on food and cooking

"A cook is creative, marrying ingredients in the way a poet marries words." Roger Verge

"A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness." Elsa Schiaparelli

"A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." Virginia Woolf

"A good meal soothes the soul as it regenerates the body. From the abundance of it flows a benign benevolence." Frederick W. Hackwood

"A messy kitchen is a happy kitchen and this kitchen is delirious." Anonymous

"A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” Tenneva Jordan

"A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which the food comes." Wendell Berry

"A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins." Laurie Colwin

"All cooking is a matter of time. In general, the more time the better." John Erskine

"Als drait zich arum broit un toit (It all comes down to bread and death)." Yiddish proverb

"Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before you do something else. Dinner is the evening." Art Buchwald

"As the days grow short, some faces grow long. But not mine. Every autumn, when the wind turns cold and darkness comes early, I am suddenly happy. It's time to start making soup again." Leslie Newman

"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it." Proverbs 15:17

"Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food." Craig Claiborne

"Do not be afraid of simplicity. If you have a cold chicken for supper, why cover it with a tasteless white sauce which makes it look like a pretentious dish on the buffet table at some fancy dress ball?" Marcel Boulestin

"Excellent potatoes, smoking hot, and accompanied by melted butter of the first quality, would alone stamp merit on any dinner." Thomas Walker

"Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction." John Cage

"Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts." James Beard

"Home grown tomatoes, home grown tomatoes
What would life be like without homegrown tomatoes
Only two things that money can't buy
That's true love and home grown tomatoes." Guy Clark