“….while bad cooking can ruin the very best of raw foodstuffs, all the arts of all the cooks in the world can do no more than palliate things stale, flat and unprofitable.”
‘Dishes & Beverages Of The Old South’
Martha McCulloch-Williams (1913)
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“Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want. I used to think that the notoriously bad cooking of the English was an example to the contrary, and that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.”
Waverly Root (1903-1982)
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“The difference between good and bad cookery can scarcely be more strikingly shown than in the manner in which sauces are prepared and served. If well made….they prove that both skill and taste have been exerted in its arrangements. When coarsely or carelessly prepared….they greatly discredit the cook.”
Eliza Acton
‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)
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“Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don’t expect ever to encounter either one.”
William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon) ‘Blue Highways’ (1982)
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“Bad cooks – and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen – have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
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“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Teddy Roosevelt
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“Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but it only takes one to burn it.”
Madeleine Bingham, ‘The Bad Cook’s Guide’
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“She did not so much cook as assassinate food.”
Storm Jameson (1891-1986)
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“When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste.”
Laiko Bahrs
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“The qualities of an exceptional cook are akin to those of a successful tightrope walker: an abiding passion for the task, courage to go out on a limb and an impeccable sense of balance.”
Bryan Miller, N.Y. Times 10/23/83
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“Cooking should be a carefully balanced reflection of all the good things of the earth.”
Jean & Pierre Troisgros
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“When she goes about her kitchen duties, chopping, carving, mixing, whisking, she moves with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, her fingers plying the food with the dexterity of a croupier.”
Craig Claiborne
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“Non cooks think it’s silly to invest two hours’ work in two minutes’ enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet.”
Julia Child (1912-2004)
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“It [soup] is to a dinner what a portico or a peristyle is to a building; that is to say, it is not only the first part of it, but it must be devised in such a manner as to set the tone of the whole banquet, in the same way as the overture of an opera announces the subject of the work.”
Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)
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“As in the fine arts, the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, so in the art of cookery is the progress gradual from the earliest and simplest modes, to those of the most complicated and refined.”
Isabella Beeton (1836-1865)
‘The Book of Household Management’ (1861)
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“Food that’s beautiful to look at seems to taste better than food that isn’t.”
Emeril Lagasse
‘Emeril’s New New Orleans Cooking’ (1993)
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“Bistro cooking is good, traditional food, earnestly made and honestly displayed. It is earthy, provincial, or bourgeois; as befits that kind of food, it is served in ample portions.”
David Liederman (New York restaurateur)
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“An unwatched pot boils immediately.”
H.F. Ellis
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“The coffee was boiling over a charcoal fire, and large slices of bread and butter were piled one upon the other like deals in a lumber yard.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
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“The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.”
Alexander Pope, ‘Satires’
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“Soup must be eaten boiling hot and coffee drunk piping hot.”
Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)
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“Women can spin very well, but they cannot write a good book of cookery.”
Dr Samuel Johnson
‘The Life of Samuel Johnson’, James Boswell (1791)
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“A combination of the qualities of the scholar, the master cook, the painter, the gastronomer, the sportsman and the pantologist, assisted by the skill of the bookmaker and etcher, will be required to compose the cookbook par excellence.”
George Ellwanger (1848-1906)
‘Pleasures of the Table’ (1902)
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“Bouillabaisse, this golden soup, this incomparable golden soup which embodies and concentrates all the aromas of our shores and which permeates, like an ecstasy, the stomachs of astonished gastronomes. Bouillabaisse is one of those classic dishes whose glory has encircled the world, and the miracle consists of this: there are as many bouillabaisses as there are good chefs or cordon bleus. Each brings to his own version his special touch.”
Curnonsky (1872-1956)
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“This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is – A sort of soup or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; All these you eat at Terre’s tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse.”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
‘Ballad of Bouillabaisse’
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“A good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger’s end.”
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)
‘Imaginary Conversations’
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“I never fancied broiling fowls; – though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.”
Ishmael in ‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Mellville (1851)
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“Grilling, broiling, barbecuing – whatever you want to call it – is an art, not just a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach.”
James Beard, ‘Beard on Food’ (1974)
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“We were taken to a fast food café where our order was fed into a computer. Our hamburgers, made from the flesh of chemically impregnated cattle, had been broiled over counterfeit charcoal, placed between slices of artificially flavored cardboard and served to us by recycled juvenile delinquents.”
Jean Michel Chapereau
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“you may make, with common white note-paper, as many little square boxes as you have mushrooms to broil; grease them with butter, put the mushrooms in, set them on the gridiron, and on a moderate fire, and serve them in the boxes when done.”
Pierre Blot, ‘Handbook of Practical Cookery’ (1867)
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“Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.”
Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)
‘Personal Pleasures’
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“I am a neat hand at cookery, and I’ll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It’s a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat.”
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
‘Doctor Marigold’ (1865)