Quotes from Bill Buford

This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury's milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.

If you're cooking with love, every plate is a unique event—you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it:

It could be Paris. It could be Rio de Janeiro. It could be anywhere but home: someplace, anyplace, disorienting enough to make him notice what he wouldn't otherwise see. (The medicinal benefits of disorientation can never be overestimated.)

I remember thinking: if the day becomes more violent, who do you blame? The English, whose behaviour on the square could be said to have been so provocative that they deserved whatever they got? The Italians, whose welcome consisted in inflicting injuries upon their visitors? Or can you place some of the blame on these men with their television equipment and their cameras, whose misrepresentative images served only to reinforce what everyone had come to expect.

It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality. (198)

A recipe is only an introduction. It is the beginning of your relationship with the dish.

I stood in the doorway of one room, lost in a meditation of the house's recurring habits. People had made love here, sweated through pregnancy, gave birth, looked after children, became ill, died, the fire always burning in the kitchen. In this room, the next generation had done the same, the fire still burning. And the next generation, for thousand years.

I was corrected on how to stir ("from the bottom up, circling, cleaning the sides as you go"), which I assume everyone else knows but which I never seemed to get right. I was corrected on my whisk ("limp wrist, figure eight, hitting four points of the bowl as if it had corners"), which I hadn't known and which is both efficient and actually rather flash (you can reach exhilarating speeds).

The three principles of a French plate are color, volume, and texture. They are rules of presentation. If your dish uses color strategically, volume (i.e., has height), and texture (mixes soft and hard, or juicy and crunchy), then it will appeal to a diner.

He is merely the first to cross an important boundary of behavior, a tactic boundary that, recognized by everyone there, separates one kind of conduct from another. He is prepared to commit this 'threshold' act – an act which, created by the crowd, would have been impossible without the crowd, even though the crowd itself is not prepared to follow: yet.

All this intelligent and careful work revealed a man of great forethought. Yet you could see in Mr. Wicks's eyes--as he stood in the shade of the terminal awning, all that tweed and education waving to us, as one by one each bus pulled out for the noisy drive into the city--that he had failed.

Cooked fat is delicious. Uncooked fat is not. Why do you stuff a goose or duck? Chefs today don't know because they don't learn the basics anymore. You stuff the bird so it cooks more slowly. With the empty cavity, you let in the heat, and the bird is cooked inside and out, and the meat is done before your fat is rendered. Stuff your bird with apple and sage, and the fat is rendered first.

I had to remind myself I was in a food shop. Even in New York, once famous for its rudeness, now stuck in a condition of permanent impatience, I had never seen anything like it. There, a retailer, however jaded, still pretends to honor the shopkeeper's code that a customer is always right. Dario followed a much blunter, take no prisoners philosophy, that actually the customer is a dick.

They are the jammiest of the jammy ingredients.

Our 'Hooligans' go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the 'Hooligan' is a hideous excrescence on our civilization. The Times [London], October 30, 1890

When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits - melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet... I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead - a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated.

The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of 'cocoa mass.'

Since 1890, the Tour d'Argent's basic recipe hasn't changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now.

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand.

Dorothy Hamilton's Techniques of Classic Cuisine.

It was one of the things you put up with: that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres. I didn't buy it, but it seemed to be so.

Mussolini was a wanker.

The French have become professional, scientific, and urban. The Italians are improvising amateurs, following rustic preparations handed down for generations. The Italians, it could be said, were still playing with their food.

The most important lesson: that each ingredient should be cooked separately.