Culinary Quotes - Page 5

• Half of the receipts in our cookbooks are mere murder to such constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. ...in America, owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of France than of England.

  Catharine Beecher

  Food, America, Sky

  Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (2008). “American Woman's Home”, p.190, Applewood Books

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• Ham's substantial, ham is fat. Ham is firm and sound. Ham's what God was getting at When He made pigs so round.

  Roy Blount, Jr.

  Food, Pigs, Cooking

  Roy Blount, Jr. (2016). “Save Room for Pie: Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations”, p.86, Macmillan

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• He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Food, Glasses, Air

  Michael Ondaatje (2011). “The English Patient”, p.27, Vintage

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• HASH: There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Food, Cooking, Definitions

  Ambrose Bierce (1958). “The Devil's Dictionary: A Selection of the Bitter Definitions of Ambrose Bierce”, p.70, Prabhat Prakashan

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• He added that a Frenchman in the train had given him a great sandwich that so stank of garlic that he had been inclined to throw it at the fellow's head.

  Ford Madox Ford

  Food, Cooking, Sandwiches

  Ford Madox Ford (1971). “The Bodley Head Ford Madox Ford: Memories and impressions”

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• He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions.

  Charles Dickens

  Food, Cooking, Ceilings

  Charles Dickens (1870). “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”, p.41

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• But I, when I undress me Each night, upon my knees Will ask the Lord to bless me With apple-pie and cheese.

  Eugene Field

  Food, Blessed, Night

  'Apple Pie and Cheese'

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• Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d' at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips.

  Calvin Trillin

  Father, Taken, Food

  Calvin Trillin (1984). “Third Helpings”, Viking Press

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• Eating highly seasoned food is unhealthful, because it stimulates too much, provokes the appetite too much, and often is indigestible.

  Catharine Beecher

  Food, Often Is, Cooking

  Catharine Beecher (2013). “Miss Beecher's Domestic Receipt-Book”, p.34, Courier Corporation

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• How come when you mix water and flour together you get glue...and then you add eggs and sugar and you get cake? Where does the glue go?

  Rita Rudner

  Food, Cake, Eggs

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• From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside who are lunching on Spa Cobb salads without blue cheese or dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both the sourdough roll and the cheese stick.

  Ann Patchett

  Food, Men, Clouds

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• I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils haricots - those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridites calling themselves human food!

  George Gissing

  Hate, Food, Names

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• Frying gives cooks numerous ways of concealing what appeared the day before and in a pinch facilitates sudden demands, for it takes little more time to fry a four-pound carp than to boil an egg.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Food, Eggs, Giving

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• A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.

  W. H. Auden

  Hope, Food, Cooking

  Collected Poems (1976) p. 639

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• I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado, or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at another man's table.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Food, Men, Turkeys

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1848). “Don Quixote”, p.30

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• FRYING-PAN, n. One part of the penal apparatus employed in that punitive institution, a woman's kitchen. The frying-pan was invented by Calvin, and by him used in cooking span-long infants that had died without baptism; and observing one day the horrible torment of a tramp who had incautiously pulled a fried babe from the waste-dump and devoured it, it occurred to the great divine to rob death of its terrors by introducing the frying-pan into every household in Geneva. Thence it spread to all corners of the world, and has been of invaluable assistance in the propagation of his sombre faith.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Long, Baptism, Cooking

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.91, University of Georgia Press

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• I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Girl, Food, Wine

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• Gazing at the typewriter in moments of desperation I console myself with three thoughts. Alcohol at six, dinner at eight, and to be immortal you've got to be dead.

  Gyles Brandreth

  Food, Eight, Typewriters

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• I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast.

  George Saintsbury

  Food, Thinking, Cooking

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• He was an innovator, an experimenter, a missionary in bringing the gospel of good cooking to the home table.

  Craig Claiborne

  Food, Home, Cooking

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• I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled...They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.

  H. L. Mencken

  Dog, Food, Differences

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• I am utterly against those confused Olios, into which men put almost all kinds of meats and Roots.

  John Evelyn

  Confused, Food, Men

  John Evelyn (1997). “John Evelyn, Cook: The Manuscript Receipt Book of John Evelyn”, Prospect Books (UK)

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• Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with... Give us pasta with a hundred fillings.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Food, Giving, Cooking

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• Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Food, Cutting, Sea

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• He receives comfort like cold porridge.

  William Shakespeare

  Food, Cooking, Comfort

  'The Tempest' (1611) act 2, sc. 1, l. 10

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