646 Quotes About Cooking

It’s too humiliating.

In my family, cooking and serving a meal always was, and still is, quintessential. The most important question you’d hear at our house is either ‘Are you hungry?’ or ‘Have you eaten?’ presuming that as long as you were not hungry, everything else was secondary. A good meal, according to our family philosophy, could defeat any drama, any worry, any existential crisis. Everything could be resolved once you’d shared a meal with your family or friends.” -Make Me an Omelette

Some people saw cooking as a chore, but not Lila. For her it was a way to express her love. It made her feel motherly and full of life.

She was the guest everyone invited when they needed to blend a group of disparate personalities, just as a roux would bind soup or sauce into velvety smoothness.

Is it an eggageration to say Clement Soup and Sourdough saved me? At night, instead of fitfully reviewing the day's error while my stomach swam and churned, I... fell asleep. My course steadied. I had taken on ballast in the form of spicy broth and fragrant bread and, maybe, two new friends, or sort-of-friends, or something.

Cooking is about life. It gives us what we need to keep going, and it gives us something to share with other people.

Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age; it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.

This ambivalence about the value of cooking raises an interesting question: Has our culture devalued food-work because it is unfulfilling by it's very nature or because it has traditionally been "women's work"?

Yet, running just beneath the surface of food industry feminism was an implicit anti-feminist message. Then as now, ads for packaged foods are aimed almost exclusively at women and so reinforced the retrograde idea that responsibility for feeding the family fell to mom. The slick new products would help her do a job that was hers & hers alone.