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Food Writing Quotes

Browse 241 quotes about Food Writing.

Food Writing Quotes

“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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“A pie is only as good as its pastry, and one of the delights of a good pie is the contrast in texture between the crisp pastry and the filling - whatever it might be. In a perfect pie, each component is independently perfect - the mouthfeel of the pastry (buttery, flaky, crumbly) and the mouthfeel of the filling (rich, unctuous, tender, sticky, crunchy, etc.); and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“Pastry-making, as every amateur baker fears, is as much about technique as ingredients. The rationale behind the well-known advice to keep the hands, implements and kitchen cool while making pastry, to use minimal water and to handle it lightly is obvious, now that we understand the process. Cool handling lengthens the time that the fat in the dough stays solid; using minimum amount of water reduces the gluten content and also allows the dough to be crisper; minimal handling also reduces the gluten, so we do not knead pastry dough as we do bread.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyDoughFood HistoryGlobal HistoryPastry
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“It is the food that looks backwards through our shared family memories. It is comfort food, the food inextricably linked in our cultural consciousness with motherhood and nationhood. Even though the pies are no longer a daily item on our dinner tables, they still figure large in many of our memories: pies mean Thanksgiving and Christmas and picnics and silly old Aunt Mabel and going to the football with Dad.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“The gluten content of the final wheat dough can be manipulated by the cook in a number of ways depending on the ultimate goal, whether it be sturdy bread or flaky pastry. (...) The first trick is to use exactly the right amount of water, for it is water that activates the gluten in flour. Fat is the second trick, and it helps the texture of pastry in a number of ways. Fat coats little packets of flour, waterproofing them and limiting the amount of water that gets in (less water, so less gluten), and it keeps the gluten strands 'short'. Little smears and gobbets of fat also separate the mini layers of dough, so that they form individual flakes or crumbs, not a solid mass.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlutenGlobal HistoryPastry
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“Like flours, not all fats are created equal. Oil is fat that is liquid at room temperature but good pastry cannot be made with oil. Flour simply absorbs the oil and the resulting dough is mealy, not tender and flaky. The ideal fat for pastry-making is one with a high melting point because the longer it takes for the fat to melt, the longer it keeps the little parcels of dough separate, generating little packets of steam to puff and lighten the dough. Pig fat (lard) has a high melting point and very little water content, so is ideal on both counts.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFatFood HistoryGlobal HistoryPastryLard
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“When was the last time you saw on a menu a chewet (a small, round pie of finely chopped meat or fish, with spices and fruit, 'made taller than a marrow pie'), a dowlet (a small pie of particularly dainty little tidbits), a herbelade or hebolace (a pie with pork mince and herb mixture), a talemouse (a sort of cheesecake, sometimes triangular in shape) or a vaunt (a type of a fruit pie)? these words (and more) were once everyday words in a baker's vocabulary. The only conclusion it is possible to draw is that the loss of so many pie-words reflects the loss of the pies themselves.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“The importance of the pie - once the 'meat and potatoes' of the English - began to slip with the increased cultivation of the actual potato in the nineteenth century. As the nineteenth became the twentieth century, social changes pushed the pie further into decline. The 'great pies' had their last glorious days in the English manor houses of the Edwardian era, before the domestic classes left to fight the First World War.”

FoodEnglandPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“When Soyer said of pies that they are 'one of our best companions du voyage through life', he was referring consumers, but he might just as well been referring to his professional colleagues, for pies have always been enormously useful to caterers and cooks, particularly at events where a large number must be fed efficiently. In modern times this is usually at sporting events such as football games, but the original experts in mass catering were the military.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryCateringGlobal HistoryMass Catering
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (...), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongi-form bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over them? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.”

BusinessCookingKitchenChefFood WritingRestaurantFood Industry
Book:Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
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“The town of Lunenburg was built on a hill running down to a sheltered harbour. On one of the upper streets stands a Presbyterian church with a huge gilded cod on its weather vane. Along the waterfront, the wooden-shingled houses are brick red, a color that originally came from mixing clay with cod-liver oil to protect the wood against the salt of the waterfront. It is the look of Nova Scotia - brick red wood, dark green pine, charcoal sea.”

Travel WritingFood WritingFood AnthropologyNova ScotiaCodCodfishLunenburg
Book:Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
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“Words often give clues to the origin of things, and I hoped to learn much about the history of the pie from the word 'pie'. The Oxford English Dictionary gives its first known use as being in the expense accounts of the Bolton Priory in Yorkshire in 1303 (although the name 'Pyman' is recorded in 1301), but admits that its origin is uncertain and that 'no further related word is known outside English'. It suggests that the word is identical in form to the same word meaning 'magpie' (...). The suggested connection is that a pie has contents of 'miscellaneous nature', similar to the magpie's colouring or to the odds and ends picked up and used by the bird to adorn its nest.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“The problem with cooking meat this way [open fire] is that even if it does not burn, the valuable and tasty juices drip away and the meat dries and shrinks. Other cooks at other times got around this problem by wrapping the meat up to protect it - in leaves, for example. Or clay. Clay that, to another cook in perhaps, another time and place, felt just like dough. This last inspired step created the primitive meat pie - something medieval cooks called a 'bake-mete'.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“The thick crust of the early pie acted like a baking dish. For hundreds of years, it was the only form of baking container - meaning everything was pie. The crust also, as it turned out, performed two other useful functions: it acted as a carrying and storage container (before lunch boxes) and, by virtue of excluding air, as a method of preservation (before canning and refrigeration).”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlobal History
Book:Pie: A Global History
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“The key is gluten. Gluten is a protein with long, elastic molecules which simultaneously enable the dough to be made stronger (by providing structure) and lighter (by enabling the trapping of air bubbles). A lot of gluten means a firm structure, which is ideal for bread, but bad for pastry. Too little gluten means no structure and no air-trapping, so flat bread and tough pastry. The task of the pastry-cook is to get just the right amount of gluten to make the pastry light and crumbly and flaky.”

FoodPieBakingFood WritingFood AnthropologyFood HistoryGlutenGlobal HistoryPastry
Book:Pie: A Global History
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