I'm adding some quotes
Well I keep on coming across new foodie quotes and I've run out of room on my other pages, so this one will be for quotes - and sometimes, maybe, the people who made them. If you have any good ones let me know and I'll add them to the list.
thoughts on food
food for thought
"My main gripe agains those who take it upon themselves to police our diet is that they fail to understand the pure pleasure of good eating, be it the smell and flavour of their cooking or the feel of it in their mouths ..." So imagine my joy when I found out that garlic, about which I am something of a zealot, is positively good for me."
"food tastes better when you eat it from something that flatters the contents."
"There is quiet food, too. The tastes of peace and quiet, of gentleness and calm." Nigel Slater
"A cookbook is only as good as its worst recipe"
"The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken. Bon appétit."
Julia Child
"The best food of a country is the traditional food which has been tried and tested over the centuries. It suits the climate, and uses the best products of that country. ... The food of a country is part of its history and civilisation, and ideally, the past and the present should be combined, so that traditional food is not lost under a pile of tins or packages."
Theodora Fitzgibbon
"salt is born of the purest parents; the sun and the sea." Pythagoras
"butter - coagulated sunlight" - Seamus Heaney
"The word crispy sells more food than almost any other adjective" Mario Batali
A muffin is just a cupcake without frosting." Erin Morgenstern - The Starless Sea
"in my view, the continual bombardment of quick and simple recipes is doing nothing to teach us how to cook. We are in serious danger of becoming slaves to recipes, rather than having the confidence to be able to walk along a supermarket aisle, or look through fridge and cupboard, to see what can be conjured up."
"Taste everything. Think about how things taste, and why. Work out how you can make things taste better. Don't settle for the shock of sheer salt and sugar, or the temptation of crisp and crunchy , over true, real flavour. When we all learn to taste, there will be less fast food, more slow conversations, less war, more peace, fewer broken homes, more families sitting around tables, fewer morally loathsome films and TV soaps, and more honest work and creativity."
"Hell, it's only food. Just enjoy it." Jill Dupleix
"We have enough masterpieces, what we need is a better standard of ordinariness."
"As with vegetables, what moved me most about fruit was the centuries of patient work that have built up the repertoire of apple, pear and strawberry varieties, that have developed cherries, peaches, plums and citrus fruit for different tastes and places."
Jane Grigson
"Almost any memory I have of a holiday is indelibly associated with good things to eat."
"Proust had his madeleines; I am devastated by the scent of yeast bread rising." Bert Greene
"Each of us eats about one thousand meals each year. It is my belief that we should try and make as many of these meals as we can truly memorable."
Robert Carrier
"I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind, Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice - and does so more vividly than any other artefact, and other medium"
Robin Sloane from the novel Sourdough
"If a dish does not turn out to be quite as it was at the remembered auberge in Normandy, or at the restaurant on the banks of the Loire, is this a matter for despair? Because it is different as by force of circumstance it must be, it is not necessarily worse. It is for us to exercise our common sense in selecting what is within our powers, in taking what suits from the immense variety of dishes which France has to offer, and to learn how to make them our own." Elizabeth David
"Good cooking is honest, sincere and simple, and by this I do not mean to imply that you will find in this, or indeed any other book, the secret of turning out first-class food in a few minutes with no trouble. Good food is always a trouble and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love". Elizabeth David
"Why should you have standards when buying? Because you're going to put this food in your mouth and swallow it and you'll do this two or three times every single day of your life. Everything you eat contributes to you being happy, or fit, or lethargic, or full of energy, or susceptible to colds and flu, or being able to think better and hold your concentration. Your hair, your fingernails, your height, your skin, everything you are is made from the food you eat." Jamie Oliver
"Food is a fickle mistress, and there's nothing like dissing something to make it seem instantly appealing."
"Every culinary endeavour starts with ingredients, - and the best start with the best. Ingredients are our sensory palette, the box of tricks from which we select the flavours and textures we most desire, in order to produce meals that will delight, comfort, refresh and excite."
"If one food was designed to be eaten, then surely it has to be fruit."
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
"In the childhood memories of every good cook, there’s a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot and a mom.” – Barbara Costikyan
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan - which is intriguing but I'm not quite sure I understand it.
"tofu - a texture awaiting a flavour" Tim Dowling
"When one thinks of the civilisation implied in the development of peaches from the wild fruit, or of apricots, grapes, pears, plums when thinks of those millions of gardeners from ancient China right across Asia and the Middle East to Rome, then across the Alps north to France, Holland and England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how can we so crassly, so brutishly, reduce the exquisite results of their labour to cans full of syrup and cardboard-wrapped blocks of ice. These gardeners were concerned to grow a better-tasting fruit or vegetable, a larger and more beautiful one too, but mainly a better-tasting one." Jane Grigson
"It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happinesss begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking."
Marcel Boulestin
Jane Austen
“God made food; the devil the cooks.” James Joyce, Ulysses
Wine is sunlight, held together by water." Galileo Galilei
"There is no mystery to food. It should be delicious wherever possible, but not a fetish. We eat to live, and there are other pleasures in life besides eating. But well-prepared food is one of the greatest, and one within the reach of anybody who can read and who cares enough to take a little trouble to do things well."
"Cooking is for eating, and for eating with pleasure."
Nika Standen Hazelton
"Always remember: If you're alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know?" Julia Child
"No matter what happens in the kitchen, never apologise!"
Julia Child
"Just start by frying off ginger, garlic and shallots and things will develop."
Poh Ling Yeow
"Seasoning should accent the food, not be the food,"
David Lebovitz
"You can tell a lot about a person by what they eat behind closed doors." Grace Dent
"In order to create a little bit of confidence, start cooking with pasta. Pasta is phenomenal. Once you've cooked pasta properly for the first time it becomes second nature."
Gordon Ramsay
"Part of the secret to success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside." Mark Twain
" I can't bear to think of a day without (just a little) chocolate. Not that I need much. But a tiny square or two is necessary if I am to retire with a feeling that my day was something." Nigel Slater
"I still get a buzz out of sharing recipes. Some people write stories, others tell jokes, I just let people know about something I made for supper that they might enjoy, too. That's all it is. A meal shared with strangers. And I can't think of anything I want to do more." Nigel Slater
"Authentic is what is personal to you" Hetty McKinnon
"if you don't cry or your eyes don't water when you're chopping onions, you're an unemotional and stubborn person"
Anon from the Feast Food Safari Cookbook
"Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first." Ernestine Ulmer
“Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.”
Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen
"comfort food and self-love coincide, and it’s the acceptance that we could all use some more of both"
Janika Popova - The Glasgow Guardian
“Oh, I adore cooking. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.” Truman Capote
"Cookbooks are reflective of the politics of their time." Quartz India
"From butter, oil, or salt, one can conjure beauty or speak in a wordless love language" Apologies I have forgotten who said this.
"Just about anything is better wrapped in pastry"
Felicity Cloake
"Eggs can be all things to all dishes: they are the emulsifier, the reconciler, the enricher, the clarifier, the one that shines, refines and completes. The essence of life indeed." Yotam Ottolenghi
"Cooking isn't about perfection, it's about achievability."
Delia Smith
"food is so much more than something that keeps hunger away: it’s about geography, culture, the environment, history, immigration, the traditional custodians of the land, health and well-being, it’s about who gets to make the food, who gets to enjoy it and who gets celebrated for it. It’s about traditions and technique, as well as wild experiments and innovation."
Lee Tran Lam
"Life is meals, as James Salter once said. I now know, as I perhaps never fully did before, the truth of this. Here is comfort and togetherness, structure and ritual. Here, even in the sad moments, is happiness."
Because cooks are perpetually dissatisfied; too often the making is more gratifying than the eating." Rachel Cooke
"Spices are the words that come together to create the language of food." Christine Manfield
"Anyone can cook a steak. It takes a modest and generous skill to turn cheaper cuts of meat into something good." Jane Grigson
"A recipe must be utterly reliable, but is always an invitation, not a command." Nigella Lawson
"No great culinary tradition dies. It just keeps evolving." Madhur Jaffrey
"The way to entice people into cooking is to cook delicious things."
Yotam Ottolenghi
"[I] had a go which is almost always a good idea."
"Cooking is all about changing your mind."
"the joy of mashed potato: ordinary and luxurious, silly and serious. Mash, wonderful mash."
Rachel Roddy
Food is soft power. In gentle and delicious fashion, it can shape preferences, open minds and create goodwill." Louise Shafia