Quotes from John Thorne

doppelgänger.

It's at this point—the purchase—as you may know, that the problem begins. The book is excellent, yes, but the author and the cuisine remain on one side of the page and I on the other. All I get are the recipes. And what I've found—and it's been a painfully long time learning—is that recipes without the author, without the cuisine to which they were once a living, seamless part, die. Or, rather, become no more and no less than any other recipe.

What we keep finding out again and again is that recipe cooking is to real cooking as painting by number is to real painting: just pretend. The problem is that we don't seem to be able to grasp it. We keep trying—with a different cookbook.

Recipes are made by breaking down a complex relationship of smell, touch, taste, and instinct born of intimate familiarity into a series of minimal commands containing none of those things.

Karen Hess, the editor, is this country's culinary conscience

Originally, Fannie Farmer used 1/3 cup of sugar. This amount has crept up over the years, even though apples get sweeter and sweeter: 1/2 cup should be plenty.

Cookbooks can be wonderfully entertaining and informative, but I don't like having to bring them with me to the stove. My goal as a cook has always been not so much to attain some specific sense of mastery as to be able to just go into the kitchen, take up what I find there, and make a meal of it.