Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, and the wisdom of cookbook writers.

Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.

In foreign countries I am drawn into grocery shops, supermarkets and kitchen supply houses. I explain this by reminding my friends that, as I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology, it is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Their first actual kiss was a one-celled organism which, after they had been standing on the stairway kissing for some time, evolved into something rather grander – a bird of paradise, for example.

I love the process of learning a thing. It’s doing a thing I find so boring.

Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment.

Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.

Most of his time appeared to be spent bumming cigarettes from people whose annual income was about a fifth of his own.

When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook’s strongest ally...