Food Writing Quotes

“The orange tree took time to create this masterpiece.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“I’ve sat in restaurants and viewed the food on the plate as I would a half-blooded mongrel. I may feel sorry for it and given time even get to like it a little, but it’s never going to really gain my affections. The plate in front of you should tantalize, seduce and enchant you. It should be a cheeky devil, a minx, a hussy even, but never a desperado”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“People ask me: Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, ad about love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow gross, unfaithful to the honor of my craft.

The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“No one is too busy to cook.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“As my library of podcast interviews was growing, I realized I had more to say about the common threads and insights I had gained into how chefs think, their methodologies, and their inspirations. Combined with my own experiences in the food industry, it was clear I had a story to tell. The result is my book, Conversations Behind the Kitchen Door. Whether you’re a professional in the industry or just a dedicated food enthusiast, I’m confident you’ll enjoy reading it.”
― Emmanuel Laroche, Conversations Behind the Kitchen Door: 50 American Chefs Chart Today’s Food Culture

“Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing.”
― James Thurber

“It is not about learning to like this or that vegetable; but developing an overall attitude to eating that is more open to variety and less governed by the simple sugar-salt-fat palate of junk food.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“We are stuck in habits and attitudes that seem impossible to break. We are stuck thinking food is love. We are stuck with guilt about food because we are female; or stuck not liking vegetables because we are male. We are stuck feeding hungers that often exist more in our brain than our stomach. We are stuck in our happy childhood memories of unhealthy foods. But the biggest way we are stuck is in our belief that our eating habits are something we can do very little about. In fact, we can do plenty. The first step is seeing that eating is a skill that each of us learns and that we retain the capacity for learning it, no matter how old we are.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Scatter the herbs across the table, sit together, and pick off the tender stems and leaves. There is a meditative rhythm and ritual to it all. It's one of those rare times we are asked to slow down, and we are able to converse, to commiserate, to gossip, to air out grievances, to share secrets and dreams. Life happens in these spaces, amid a field of greens.”
― Naz Deravian, Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories

“Torture Cuisine by Stewart Stafford

Kitchen death growls,
Whipping that cream,
Beating those eggs,
Burning all the toast.

Knifing diced cheese,
Drawn, quartered ham,
Straining tomato sauce,
Crushed-down walnuts.

Peeling potatoes naked,
Then smashing them up,
You say purée, I say mash,
Turkey and chicken skewers.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Student life is tough anywhere, and more so, away from the support systems one is used to at home. Even for the most adaptable among us, in alien surroundings, eating food that is familiar is comforting.”
― Rukmini Srinivas, Tiffin: Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food

“Documenting what I do in the kitchen can feel like the task of recording almost nothing. But it is the nothing I am doing, and do almost every day, and have been doing every day for over a decade. It is the nothing that has been part of almost every social interaction of my life as an adult and through which I have come to know almost all the people I love. It is the nothing through which I have been sustained and transformed.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“This cook shows that liberation must give dreams earthly form. Her food demonstrates that the purpose of political struggle is to make life materially vibrant and gorgeous for each person.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“What I want for the people I cook for is for them to enjoy their own perversions at the table, to feel free to exhibit a lack of constraint.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Feeding is learning.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“In contrast to all the other things we work on in life that are far less likely to increase our wellbeing - including dieting - it is astonishing how little effort we put into changing our eating preferences for the better.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“You were a child once, too. When you arrived in the world, your only food preferences were milk and buried memories from your mother’s diet. Those early weeks were dominated by meals - the stab of hunger, the sweet contentment of being sated - but you could not yet tell dinner from breakfast. You didn’t yet know - lucky you! - what a trans fat was; or a frappuccino. No one had taught you to worry whether you were getting enough protein, or to feel guilt when your stomach was full. You had never watched a fast-food commercial, and on the relative merits of quinoa and macarons you had no opinion. Food was a wide open for you. The great garden of ingredients - from bitter greens to sweet dates - was all equally unknown: all new, all strange, all waiting to be discovered.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“It is genuinely possible to reach the point where you desire broccoli more than fries and wholemeal sourdough more than sliced white bread.”
― Bee Wilson, First Bite: How We Learn to Eat

“Only the rougher folks are out at night, and Blue Jean's is the one place they'll go for a meal. With a reputation of serving anybody, no matter who they are or what they're involved in, the diner attracts all sorts of characters.”
― Maisy Heart, Midnight at the Diner: A Young Adult Romantic Suspense Thriller

“Be open to the belief that your food consumption should never bring you guilt and should only bring you the natural pleasure it was designed for. If it’s not, you’re doing it wrong.”
― Heather Mathes, Paid to Be Perfect: The Secret to Finding Your Perfect

“I was beginning to believe that it is foolish and perhaps pretentious and often boring, as well as damnably expensive, to make a meal of four or six courses just because the guests who are to eat it have always been used to that many. Let them try eating two or three things, I said, so plentiful and so interesting and so well cooked that they will be satisfied. And if they are not satisfied, let them stay away from our table, and our leisurely comfortable friendship at that table.

I talked like that, and it worried Al a little, because he had been raised in a minister's family and had been taught that the most courteous way to treat guests was to make them feel as if they were in their own homes. I, to his well-controlled embarrassment, was beginning to feel quite sure that one of the best things I could do for nine-tenths of the people I knew was to give them something that would make them forget Home and all it stood for, for a few blessed moments at least.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon

“Mrs Beeton writes in anticipation of her absence.”
― Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen

“Are you hungry?' I say, slightly mischievously.
'Very, he says, unfurling his napkin.

This is a shame, because we're sitting down for a tasting menu that will not be a meal, but more a random collection of the chef's ambitions, presented with seventeen verses of Vogon poetry from the staff as they dole out tiny plates of his life story. These tomatoes remind chef of his grandmother's allotment. This eel is a tribute to his uncle's fishing prowess. I will pull the requisite faces to cope with all of this. The lunch will be purposefully challenging, at times confusing and served ritualistically in a manner that requires the diner to behave like a congregation member of a really obscure sect who knows specifically when to bow her head and when to pass the plate and what lines to utter when.”
― Grace Dent, Hungry

“...and it just pisses me off more. Like yeah, I cry when I watch those sad puppy videos too, but Gabriel's not actually a puppy abandoned by his owner. He's an upper middle-class Vermont kid who's parents business beats ours like ten months out of twelve. It's not my fault that emotionally, his about as stable as a cheap styrofoam cup.”
― Emery Lee

“Being a restaurateur means being a self-starter and being independent. It is synonymous with being an entertainer. You have to perform to market your idea to ensure other people will also like it as much as you do.”
― Jack Rasmussen, Fine Dining: The Secrets Behind the Restaurant Industry

“When it comes to food, by Bourdain standards, I’m no connoisseur. I don’t eat fetal duck eggs and describe them as delicious.”
― Carol Vorvain, OMSARUZ: Humorous tales from Oman, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan

“Jane Grigson joined the Observer magazine in the summer of 1968. Her first column was about strawberries. She wrote a recipe for strawberry barquettes-- small pastry boats filled with fruit and lacquered with redcurrant jam so that they looked like jewels. There was another for strawberry brulée in a sweet sablé shell, and coeur à la crème-- a cream pudding set in a heart-shaped mould and encircled with fruit. 'In Venice, in the season of Alpine strawberries...' she wrote, and it didn't really matter what she said next, because you were already in.
In most recipes, the introduction serves the recipes. Jane's was the other way around. She wrote about the hybridized origins of modern strawberries in French market gardens, and how they feature in the mythology of the fertility goddess Frigg. After a few lines on the demanding anatomy of strawberry plants, she devoured into Jane Austen, talking about the agro-cosplay fruit-picking of the Regency ball-gown set. She refused to be complacent, especially about the things her readers already thought they knew. 'Strawberries, sugar and cream. The combination allows no improvement, you think?' Well, you're wrong.
None of this would've counted for much if the recipes weren't great, but they really were. One week she'd give you smart alternatives to traditional Christmas cake-- rounds of meringue stacked with coffee cream, or Grasmere shortcake with preserved ginger. Another week it'd be the unimpeachable precision of carrot salad, celery soup or a recipe for ice cream flavored with cooked, puréed apples. The cooking was pantheistic and it dealt with everything from kippers to apples, parsley, prunes and fennel with the same care, even love. We get smug these days about how broad our tastes are, and to an extent we're right. But a newspaper now would never run a double-page spread of recipes for tripe.
The magic of Jane Grigson is that though she was a smart cook, she was really a skilled purveyor of daydreams-- even if those daydreams were granular and exactingly researched. 'I sometimes think that the charm of a country's cookery lies not so much in its classic dishes as in its quirks and fancies,' she wrote. This included the esoterica of regional pies and rare apple cultivars. Something could be worthwhile without being useful. 'Walk into the yard of Château Mouton Rothschild,' began Jane's recipe for jellied rabbit, 'and you see a scatter of small fires. Some flare into the sky, others smoke as they are fed faggots of vine prunings.' Noisettes de porc aux pruneaux de Tours, crépinettes with chestnuts, carottes à la Vichy, angel's hair charlotte. She drew from the culinary canon as far back as Gervase Markham's seventeenth-century The English Huswife.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“If Jane was a romantic, Margaret was more high-impact-- if she wasn't throwing feasts at the flat, she was at the Ivy down the road. After working as a critic for Gourmet and the Good Food Guide, she opened a restaurant, Lacy's, which closed down after a karmic run of bad reviews. Food writers still haven't learned their lesson on this particular count, and I'd like to clear things up: it is much easier to go from restaurateur to cookbook author then the other way around.
At home, though, Margaret was a great cook. She also had the gift of being a great shopper. She frontloaded the effort so that when she got into the kitchen, she could focus on the basics of the cooking itself. You could say she wrote a template for bougie cooking culture today, where it's about the produce stores you go to, as much as what you do with the ingredients at the end. One of her columns was all about black pepper, mustard and salt. Good pepper steak will have the aromatics of cathedral incense-- a warm anchor note, a resinous edge, harmonic iterations of spice and musk, and a more piquant heat laid over the top. If you're going to cook, you need to consider the geometry of Maldon salt and learn how to deploy French mustard correctly in lapin moutarde. The average British cook at the time was probably using pre-ground pepper and a reflexive pinch of salt.
Nobody did an opening gambit like her. 'No self-respecting sardine would dream of being seen more than twenty miles north of Cherbourg,' she'd write. 'There has been a ridiculous rumor around for some years that puddings are out of fashion and likely to stay so,' she wrote. 'Nothing could be further from the truth. It is simply wishful thinking on the part of housewives and slimmers.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“For any recipe writer, the mark of success isn't teaching people how to cook well, it's showing them how to think well about food, of which 90 per cent is just about having the confidence to disagree. Margaret got into the history of things, explaining that flummery-- a jellied fruit cream-- used to be set with the shavings of the horn of a young deer, and then was made using the gelatinous powers of simmered calves' foot, and then with isinglass-- a collagen derived from the swim bladder of a fish. In the end, she gave you a more down-to-earth raspberry syllabub recipe with Sauternes, rosewater and cream. Margaret could give a detailed appraisal of tinned foods or she could convince you-- like she convinced me-- that a cheese soufflé isn't just a reasonable proposition but in fact an easy midweek lunch. 'Why should people enjoy cooking?' Margaret would say, because she knew it was her job to put forward a case.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“Margaret and Jane didn't really get non-European food, even at a time when cooking from former and contemporary colonies-- India, Hong Kong at the time, Jamaica, Trinidad-- was working deeper into the canon. And they could be out of touch-- Margaret's bon viveur lifestyle, Jane's cottagecore cave house in rural France. Like a lot of food writers, Jane was interested in a fantasy kind of peasantry, but not the actual realities of shopping in a Tesco now.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now