Quotes About Culinary

This one is from the 1851 edition of Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery: BROILED SALMON Split the salmon and take out the bones as nicely as possible without mangling the flesh. Then cut it into filets or steaks about an inch thick. Dry them lightly in a cloth and dredge them in flour. Take care not to squeeze or press them. Have ready some clear, bright, coals, such as are

General S. P. Lyman quotes Webster concluding one recipe: "Such a dish, smoked hot, placed before you, after a long morning spent in exhilarating sport, will make you no longer envy the gods.

An unhappily married woman is necessarily a bad cook.

I could eat bloody Elvis - if you put enough vinegar on him.

And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don't know what they want to eat.

Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparing them until they are proud of the result. To either respect in this way their own past—or express through cooking their dreams for the future. Every citizen would thus have their own specialty. Why can we not do this? There is no reason in the world. Let us then go forward. With vigor.

These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn't really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.

A proper saute pan, for instance, should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull. If you have any doubts about which will dent — the victim's head or your pan — then throw that pan right in the trash.

Line cooks are the heroes.

Food, it appeared, could be important. It could be an event. It had secrets.

Toast your goddamn muffins.

As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.

I can't imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi.

This book is about street-level cooking and its practitioners. Line cooks are the heroes.

I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product.

I believe the words "meat" and "treated with ammonia" should never occur in the same paragraph—much less the same sentence. Unless you're talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

I know how old most seafood is on Monday — about four to five days old!

I think people lose sight of the fact that chefs should be ultimately in the pleasure business, not in the look-at-me business.

I make two cook like you in the toilette each morning! You are deezgusting!

You know, I'll tell you honestly: if you like food and you haven't come here to eat, you're really missing the fucking boat. This is world-class food; this is world-class wine; this is world-class cheese. The next big thing is Croatia. If you haven't been here, you're a fucking idiot. I'm an idiot.

Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is invaluable. As is Nicolas Freleng's The Kitchen, David Blum's Flash in the Pan, the Batterberrys' fine account of American restaurant history, On the Town in New York, and Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel.

Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what's on the plate—but everything that's not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound.