203 Quotes About Food-writing

After a few millennia of inspiration, the primitive clay oven gave rise to the gleaming modern steel version. A high-tech oven alone does not, however, turn a bake-mete into a pie as we know it. One more important development was necessary. Pastry had to be invented.

Dough becomes pastry when fat is added.

Wheat is the only grain with a significant amount of gluten, so we have our first clue to the origins of pastry. Superb pastry could only have developed where wheat was grown: rye, barley and oats do not make good pastry, nor do rice or maize or potato starch.

As far as a time-frame for these developments goes, we can probably reasonably deduce that the pie began its life some time before the fourteenth century in those areas of Europe where wheat was grown and pigs and cattle reared.

The importance of the pie - once the 'meat and potatoes' of the English - began to slip with the increased cultivation of the actual potato in the nineteenth century. As the nineteenth became the twentieth century, social changes pushed the pie further into decline. The 'great pies' had their last glorious days in the English manor houses of the Edwardian era, before the domestic classes left to fight the First World War.

The strangely marvellous thing is that, we refuse to relinquish the pie. We cling to the idea of it with some fervour, in spite of its fading reality on our tables. Why is it so? What is it about pies?

Of course, only Americans can name a shop In-n-Out Burger without collapsing into a heap of dirty sniggers. You know the difference between them and us? To us, a double entendre means only one thing; to them, it means absolutely nothing.

There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.

Look at your waiter's face. He knows. It's another reason to be polite to your waiter: he could save your life with a raised eyebrow or a sigh.