… food is not simply organic fuel to keep body and soul together, it is a perishable art that must be savoured at the peak of perfection.

Give two cooks the same ingredients and the same recipe; it is fascinating to observe how, like handwriting, their results differ. After you cook a dish repeatedly, you begin to understand it. Then you can...

We’re cooking with gas now.

Melissa had never really caught the culinary bug; in fact, she’d all but had herself vaccinated against it.

How wonderful are the women and men in the world who feed us. Especially those who feed us with no salary. The mothers—I thought. The wives.

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.

Somewhere close behind air and water is the need for food.

TV cookery is very like internet porn – the overwhelming majority of its audience will never ever get to act out what’s happening on screen.

Fussing over food was important. It gave a shape to the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner; beginning, middle, end.

He kept one eye on Matt as he talked. He could tell Matt was close to orgasm by the way he title his head to the side and bit his lower lip. “And what about...

The complete recipe for imagination is absolute boredom.

I think I’ll add a little chili powder.” ~ Seth Asa, age 37From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012

I’m clingy like clang on pots. My love is cookable.

There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.

The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a what-the-hell attitude.

But since soup mainly involves tossing everything in a pot and waiting, it’s one of my better dishes.

Only cowards cook on “low.

A woman always has half an onion left over, no matter what the size of the onion, the dish or the woman

Warm familiar scents drift softly from the oven,And imprint forever upon our heartsThat this is homeand that we are loved.

…food is capable of feeding far more than a rumbling stomach. Food is life; our well-being demands it. Food is art and magic; it evokes emotion and colors memory, and in skilled hands, meals become...

Nana’s oven-baked fried chicken cut off the bone (with plenty of ketchup) was a huge hit. So were Thanksgiving turkey bathed in gravy and Nana’s Passover brisket

Lillian sometimes wondered why psychologists focused so much on a couple’s life in their bedroom. You could learn everything about a couple just watching their kitchen choreography as they prepared dinner.

In fact, people who posses not magic at all can instill their home-cooked meals with love and security and health, transforming ingredients and bringing disparate people together as family and friends. There’s a reason that...

Celery as celery was bad. Celery fried was the work of Satan.

Taking solitude in stride was a sign of strength and of a willingness to take care of myself. This meant – among other things – working productively, remembering to leave the house, and eating well....

Now I know why I had that dream last night. It was a premonition forewarning me of the death of my cooking career!””I doubt that your cooking career is over. You may be working at...

First off, let’s clear this up—fries are not a side dish and you can’t count those as a vegetable. Sorry.

I’m not defending it, and we are concerned about consumer perceptions, but the fact of the matter is, cooking destroys any virus, so canned food, as long as the canning is done properly, doesn’t present...

When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but...

Those are people who are cooking in the backs of vans, SUVs and vehicles,

Cooking skills aside, my mother is an exceptional nurturer.

Dear Eloisa (said I) there’s no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle. (for I was willing to make light of it in order to comfort her) I beg you would not...

Cooking is not a science but an art, mistakes are okay, messes are fine—the pleasure is in the creating and the sharing of the result.

This is the body’s nurse; but since man’s witFound the art of cookery, to delight his sense,More bodies are consumed and kill’d with itThan with the sword, famine, or pestilence.

Dinner alone is one of life’s pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.

Save the Planet…Buy Organic

If God had created celery, it would only have two stalks, because that’s the most that almost any recipe ever calls for.

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes – all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine...

I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe.

I had a dream about you. You were cooking me dinner, and I was standing by the stove questioning your every move. You found me ungrateful, and I found the number for Chinese takeout. I...

The butcher died, and he requested to be cremated. But I don’t want to burn him, because I like my meat medium rare.

If you are careful,’ Garp wrote, ‘if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage...

We had this big grill at his house, and I remember, one night he said, ‘Sam, tonight you’re feeding us,’ He showed me how to push on the middle of the steaks to see how...

…I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in ‘greens’ than it is in meat – both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that...

But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.

When it comes to cooking now, my motto is “out with the whites!

Looks delicious,” he lied. “A mite crispy along the edges – but then, I like it that way.”Incredulous eyes met his own. “You like your potatoes burned?”Ah, so he’d been right about that. If he...

Standing back and staring blankly at the glass, he realized he had no idea what it meant to preheat. Obviously he heated it prior to something, but to what?-Boyd

In its essence, a meal is a creative act that has its genesis in the mind of someone who cares enough to plan it, gather ingredients and labor over its creation.

If it’s good enough to drink, it’s good enough to cook with!