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Quote by M.F.K. Fisher

“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”

Quote by M.F.K. Fisher

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M.F.K. Fisher

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“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.”

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Book:Conversations Behind the Kitchen Door: 50 American Chefs Chart Today’s Food Culture
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“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.”

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Book:Midnight at the Diner: A Young Adult Romantic Suspense Thriller
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“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.”

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Book:Long Ago In France: The Years In Dijon
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“...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.”

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Author:Emery Lee
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“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.”

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Book:All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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“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.”

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Book:All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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“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.”

TraditionalFood WritingModern SocietyCottagecore
Book:All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now
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