Quotes from Laurie Colwin

Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.

My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me.

There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down.

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato.

There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.

No one who cooks cooks alone.

I myself am not particularly interested in restaurant cooking. I don't really want to learn how to make a napoleon. I'd much rather learn how to make a very good lemon cake, which you can make in your own home. I like plain, old-fashioned home food.

I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook.

Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that.

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.

The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: Even the simplest food is a gift.

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.

When it comes to cakes and puddings, savouries, bread and tea cakes, the English cannot be surpassed.

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, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.

Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.

For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.

From Laurie Colwin: Lovely writing! About grief she writes: I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.

Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.

You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.

Marriage, it turned out, was a series of small events.