“Cooking was a great discovery not merely because it gave us better food, or even because it made us physically human. It did something even more important: it helped make our brains uniquely large, providing a dull human body with a brilliant human mind.”
Source: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
“It smells good in here”, Ostin said.
“It’s garlic the woman said, smiling. “Garlic always smells good. Except on your breath.”
“Good nutrition is always an excellent starting point in regaining health.”
“God has subjected man to six great necessities: birth, action, eating, sleep, reproduction and death.”
Source: The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
“Fishing tip #11: To make your fish look fresher, stick those plastic googly eyes on them—even if your fish are still alive and swimming. Fish are natural clowns, they will find your sense of humor endearing, and they will appreciate you more when you eat them.”
Source: 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat
“Watches and clocks are round, like the product Brick Oven serves with five-star flavor, because it's always pizza time. But I'm always split over what to order, because I make their wings disappear like I'm Amelia Earhart.”
Source: 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat
“Our meals, the dishes we're creating, bring on new sensations---an awakening of sorts for certain people, albeit nostalgia or something else. Food brings on emotions---and we're doing things right if we're bringing them out in people."
"Food is about balance of flavors and textures and taste, not emotion."
Charles grips my shoulders. "Kate, when you cook, how are you doing it? With anger or with love?"
"Probably a little of both sometimes," I gasp. "What are you saying? People are eating my emotions? Like in that movie with Sarah Michelle Gellar? Simply Irresistible? She was a chef, like me, with a flailing restaurant, and there was a rich guy, like you. And a crab."
He snickers. "This is real life, not the movies. And I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.”
Source: The Spice Master at Bistro Exotique
“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.”
Source: Tiffin: Memories and Recipes of Indian Vegetarian Food
“November was my favorite time of the year because so many of the foods that stirred my cooking spirit burst into the season---mussels, oysters, and a variety of squashes exploding in yellows and oranges, including my former nemesis: the potimarron.”
Source: Sophie Valroux's Paris Stars
“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.”
Source: Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen