646 Quotes About Cooking

It is childish to eat primarily or only to please your tongue.

[Y]ou can't control everything. Anything, really. Like the food we've been making. We can follow the recipe exactly as your grandmother wrote it, do everything exactly--or almost exactly--as she had, and the dish can come out so-so instead of amazing. Or it can come out amazing when you were expecting very little.

yet one animal food critic in particular commented that his dish had a certain ‘je ne sais’, but all that was missing was the ‘quoi’.

A god who gave us everything we wanted would be the most malevolent god of all. With an infantile curiosity, we insist on tasting the cockroach on the floor while our father is preparing a magnificent feast for us.

The fire alarm went off. Fire engines came racing; we all rushed out on the gravel drive, everyone thinking it was us. In fact, one of the elderly residents of Saltram had left a pan on the oven in her flat. Apparently this happens all the time. The tenant in question is appearing as an extra -- playing one of the cooks.

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.

Just because you spend all those years in school and become a famous doctor doesn't mean you know how to cook.

The English murder their meat twice: once when they shoot it, again when they cook it. 'Drôle, n'est-ce pas'?

You have come nearer to mastering a good many aspects of cooking than anyone except a handful of great chefs, and some day it will pay off. I know it will. You will just have to go on working, and teaching, and getting around, and spreading the gospel until it does. (Avis DeVoto to Julia Child)