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Culinary Quotes

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw

But I always felt that I’d rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise

I find a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.
Madame Benoit

It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Conversation is the enemy of food and good wine.
Alfred Hitchcock


A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it.
Katharine Whitehorn

When you pour yourself down as rain on earth, every living creature is filled with joy and knows food will be abundant for all.
Prashna Upanishad, 10

Garlic is the ‘vanilla’ of Provence.
French proverb


Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith
Matthew 23:23

It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you’ve done, or think you can do. There’s a confrontation with destiny awaiting you. Somewhere, there is a chile you cannot eat.
Daniel Pinkwater, “A Hot Time in Nairobi

His idea of heaven is eating pate de fois gras to the sound of trumpets.
Sydney Smith

Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.
Plato


In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan, Cosmos

All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.
John Gunther


Sir To. Dost tho think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
Clo. Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i’ the mouth too!
William Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night

Stock to a cook is voice to a singer.
Anonymous

After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual ‘food’ out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps.
Miss Piggy

Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well matched they are as body and soul, living partners.
Andre Simon


Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites.
Marcus Fabius Quintilian (35- 90 AD
)

Without butter, without eggs, there is no reason to come to France.
Paul Bocuse


The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.
Michel de Montaigne

Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.
Samuel Pepys, 1633-1703, in his Diary

Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him of the entire weekend.
Zenna Schaffer

The hostess must be like the duck calm and unruffled on the surface, and paddling like hell underneath.
Anonymous


We may live without poetry, music and art; We may live without conscience and live without heart; We may live without friends; We may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch.
James Beard

Grub first, then ethics
Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956
.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire

Salt is white and pure —there is something holy in salt.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance.
E.V. Lucas

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you’re hungry again.
George Miller

The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday —but never jam today.
Lewis Carroll

You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.
Yogi Berra

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.
John Keats


It is contrary to the will of God to eat delicate food hastily.
Chang Chao


Meat is a status dish in which the sizzle counts for more than the nutritional worth.
Magnus Pyke

Food is the most primitive form of comfort.
Sheila Graham

There is no such thing as a little garlic.
Arthur Baer

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
WC Fields

Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education.
Mark Twain

I consider the discovery of a dish which sustains our appetite and prolongs our pleasures as a far more interesting event than the discovery of a star.
Henrion de Pensey

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn’t care to drink with— even if he drank.
H.L. Mencken

It is the destiny of mint to be crushed.
Waverly Root

While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.
Fran Lebowitz

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that you melt butter and add flour, then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing. It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure!
Nora Ephron

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.
Sophia Loren