Quotes About Cooking

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

To be a wife was to cook. Not to eat—that was a different matter entirely—but to cook.

It was the early 1960s, and the best-known names in home cooking—Fannie Farmer, Betty Crocker, Irma Rombauer, Dione Lucas—projected a warm and cozy domestic image that was the opposite of what she and David were after.

Cooking — that is, the actual mixing, measuring, boiling, and baking — was taught under the heading Laboratory Practice.

The characteristic sweetness of much American cooking was also established during these years, as cooks relied more and more on the blandness and general acceptability of sugar as a flavoring.

In recent years women have been moving into the realm of professional cooking in significant numbers, but at its highest levels the world of great cookery is probably more staunchly masculine than the armed forces.

After all, academic reputations were at stake. Home cooking was associated with women, which was bad enough, and housework, which was fatal. Luckily

No matter how interesting your spouse is, there are only so many ways you can make a meatloaf or recount your day's experiences over dinner.

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.

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

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

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.

KATH PHARAOH'S WAY WITH EEL'S The young ones are the best, before the turn yellow. Put them in a pillowcase with a handful of salt and swish that around in a tub of water till the sliminess is gone. Fry them in bacon fat. They're soon done. If you can't get elvers, then get an old boy, eight or nine years old. After you've skinned him, cut him into two-inch pieces and bake him on a grid. That needs a good hot flame. Nice with piccalilli.

I finish the potatoes. She send me to the TV to watch the parades. Dad stumbles downstairs. How is she? he asked before he goes in the kitchen. It's Thanksgiving, I say. Dad puts on his coat. Doughnuts? he asks. I nod.

I am strong enough to pick up a stick of butter. I am strong enough to peel off the paper wrapper, drop a hunk in the pan, and watchlistensmell it melt.

The reason I started officially learning to cook was because when I first got pregnant, I had to face the sad fact that I didn't even know how to boil an egg.

I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.

I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen

There is too much talk of cooking being an art or a science – we are only making ourselves something to eat.

The frying pan you should give to your enemy. Food should not be prepared in fat. Our bodies are adapted to a stone age diet of roots and vegetables.

On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)

I love watching, I love getting all the science about food. That's one of my favorite things.

I did an O-level in domestic science when I was at school, but on the day of the practical exam, it was a cookery nightmare.

The way I cook it's more like mad science. There's a lot of inspiration and dramatic failure with the occasional gorgeous success.