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A Collection of Culinary Quotations

...and what could be cheesier than a long list of Culinary Quotations?

I could say, as Ralph Waldo Emerson did, "I hate quotations" -- but it would be a lie. Better, perhaps is Peter Anderson's "Quotations are a columnist's bullpen. Stealing someone else's words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own." So, as a public service, allow me to spare you countless embarrassments -- well, several hundred, anyway:

  • "...all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen." H.L. Mencken
  • "…as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death…" Abraham Lincoln
  • "…cassoulet, like life itself, is not so simple as it seems." Paula Wolfert
  • "…counterfeit foods are common in times of scarcity: wartime ersatz coffee for example. Or carob for real chocolate, when there is a scarcity of common sense." Janet Clarkson
  • "...he is a heavy eater of beef. Me thinks it doth harm to his wit." Shakespeare
  • "...if ever the sun rises upon Barbecue, its flavor vanishes like Cinderella's silks, and it becomes cold baked beef -- staler in the chill dawn than illicit love." William Allen White
  • "…if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime." Edward Abbey
  • "...Manson’s violent, antisocial behavior might have been avoided if only he had put some chopped walnuts in his granola." Kristin Meyers & Joby Martin
  • "...round a table delicately spread, three or four may sit in choice repast or five at the most. Who otherwise shall dine, are like a troop marauding for their prey." Archestratus
  • "...shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle. Indeed of the whole realm of Nature the sea is in many ways the most harmful to the stomach, with its great variety of dishes and tasty fish." Pliny the Elder
  • "...Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist — the Indians having long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with the Lord, with the thanks due." Mark Twain
  • "...the act of eating,which hath by several wise men been considered as extremely mean and derogatory from the philosophic dignity, must be in some measure performed by the greatest prince, hero, or philosopher upon earth; nay, sometimes Nature hath been so frolicsome as to exact of these dignified characters a much more exorbitant share of this office than she hath obliged those of the lowest orders to perform." Henry Fielding
  • “…the agent provocateur of a good dinner.” Carême (on soup)
  • "[The (apple) pie should be eaten] while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of candied juice along the edges (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its own lips watered!), of a mild and modest warmth, the sugar suggesting jelly, yet not jellied, the morsels of apple neither dissolved nor yet in original substance, but hanging as it were in a trance between the spirit and the flesh of applehood... then, O blessed man, favored by all the divinities! eat, give thanks, and go forth, 'in apple-pie order!'" Henry Ward Beecher
  • "...the best poet is the man who delivers our daily bread: the local baker...." Pablo Neruda
  • "…the key dietary messages are stunningly simple: Eat less, move more, eat more fruits and vegetables, and don't eat too much junk food. It's no more complicated than that." Marion Nestle
  • "…[the persimmon’s] bitter power of astringency is surprising, and seems capable of suspending for a time all the faculties of the lips, and binds up the risible muscles of the sufferer to the same extent that it excites those of a spectator." Charles Augustus Murray
  • "…the rapturous, wild, and ineffable pleasure of drinking at someone else's expense." Henry Sambrook Leigh
  • "...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out." E.M. Forster
  • "...what is your host's purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi." P. J. O'Rourke
  • "…when the largest mussel ever seen thereabouts – eighteen inches long if memory serves – was found near the mouth of the Rhone, a regional newspaper concluded its coverage of the event not with the announcement of its donation to a museum but with words ‘It was delicious.’" Jay Jacobs
  • "A bagel creation that would have my parents turning over in their graves is the oat-bran bagel with blueberries and strawberries. It's a bagel nightmare, an ill-conceived bagel form if there ever was one." Ed Levine
  • "A bagel is a doughnut with the sin removed." George Rosenbaum
  • "A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body." Mark Twain
  • "A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner." Francis Bacon
  • "A Bearnaise sauce is simply an egg yolk, a shallot, a little tarragon vinegar, and butter, but it takes years of practice for the result to be perfect." Fernand Point
  • "A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world." Louis Pasteur
  • "A cabbage is a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head." Ambrose Bierce
  • "A carbonated wine foisted upon Americans (who else would drink it?) by winery ad agencies as a way of getting rid of inferior champagne by mixing it with inferior burgundy." John Ciardi, on cold duck
  • "A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality." Clifton Fadiman
  • "A chop is a piece of leather skillfully attached to a bone and administered to the patients at restaurants." Ambrose Bierce
  • ”A clever cook can make good meat of a whetstone.” Erasmus
  • "A cocktail is to a glass of wine as rape is to love." Paul Claudel
  • "A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook." H.H. Munro (Saki)
  • "A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet: he has no need for it, being filled as he is with a God-given and intelligently self-cultivated sense of gastronomical freedom." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "A converted cannibal is one who, on Friday, eats only fishermen." Emily Lotney
  • "A cook is creative, marrying ingredients in the way a poet marries words." Roger Verge
  • "A cook, when I dine, seems to me a divine being, who from the depths of his kitchen rules the human race. One considers him as a minister of heaven, because his kitchen is a temple, in which his ovens are the altar." Marc Antoine Desaugiers
  • "A Cornish hen in the hand is only enough for one person." Unknown
  • “A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. They are great softeners of temper and promoters of domestic harmony.” William Cobbett
  • "A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety." Aesop
  • "A cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar and then thrown out, as good for nothing," Samuel Johnson, misquoted by Waverley Root
  • "A cup of coffee - real coffee - home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all." Henry Ward Beecher
  • "A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish." W. H. Auden
  • "A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • “A diet is when you watch what you eat and wish you could eat what you watch.” Hermione Gingold
  • "A dinner divested of ceremony, is an act of perfidy." Anonymous
  • "A dressing is not a compote
    A dressing is not a custard
    It consists of pepper and salt,
    Vinegar, oil and mustard." Ogden Nash
  • "A drinking man's someone who wants to forget he isn't still young and believing." Tennessee Williams
  • "A few years ago it was considered chic to serve Beef Wellington; fortunately, like Napoleon, it met its Waterloo." Rene Veaux
  • "A Finnan haddock has a relish of a peculiar and delicate flavour, inimitable on any other coast than that of Aberdeenshire. Some of our Edinburgh philosophers tried to produce their equal in vain. I was one of a party at dinner where the philosophical haddocks were placed in competition with the genuine Finnan fish. These were served round without distinguishing whence they came; but only one gentleman out of twelve present espoused the cause of philosophy." Sir Walter Scott
  • "A first rate soup is better than a second rate painting." Abraham Maslow
  • "A food is not necessarily essential just because your child hates it." Katherine Whitehorn
  • "A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something Brussels sprouts never do." P. J. O'Rourke
  • "A fully gorged belly never produced a sprightly mind." Jeremy Taylor
  • "A Georgia peach, a real Georgia peach, a backyard great-grandmother's orchard peach, is as thickly furred as a sweater, and so fluent and sweet that once you bite through the flannel, it brings tears to your eyes." Melissa Fay Greene
  • "A good apprentice cook must be polite with the dishwasher as with the chef." Fernand Point
  • "A good breakfast is no substitute for a large dinner." Chinese Proverb
  • "A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness." Elsa Schiaparelli
  • "A good cook is not necessarily a good woman with an even temper. Some allowance should be made for artistic temperament." X. Marcel Boulestin
  • "A good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." Virginia Woolf
  • "A good eater must be a good man; for a good eater must have a good digestion, and a good digestion depends upon a good conscience." Benjamin Disraeli
  • "A good meal ought to begin with hunger." French Proverb
  • "A good meal soothes the soul as it regenerates the body. From the abundance of it flows a benign benevolence." Frederick W. Hackwood
  • "A gourmet is just a glutton with brains." Philip W. Haberman, Jr.
  • "A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch." James Beard
  • "A hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning." Samuel Johnson
  • "A highbrow is the kind of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso." Alan Patrick Herbert
  • "A hippo sandwich is easy to make. All you do is simply take one slice of bread, one slice of cake, some mayonnaise, one onion ring, one hippopotamus, one piece of string, a dash of pepper. That ought to do it. And now comes the problem... biting into it!" Shel Silverstein
  • "A host at a table where a guest is obliged to ask, is a host dishonored." Baron Brisse
  • "A hot dog at the ball park is better than steak at the Ritz." Humphrey Bogart
  • "A house where neither wine nor welcome is served to friends, soon will have none." Rob Hutchison
  • "A hundred standing people smiling and talking to one another, nodding like gooney birds." William Cole (on cocktail parties)
  • "A hungry stomach seldom scorns plain food." Horace
  • "A little garlic, judiciously used, won't seriously affect your social life and will tone up more dull dishes than any commodity discovered to date." Alexander Wright
  • "A little lemon juice makes everything taste better." Virginia Sanborn Burleigh
  • "A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die." Mark Twain
  • "A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite." Leo Tolstoy
  • "A man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstracted meditation, or remote enquiries." Samuel Johnson
  • "A man in the wilderness asked me, How many strawberries grow in the sea? I answered him, as I thought good, As many as red herrings grow in the wood." Mother Goose
  • "A man is in general better pleased when has had a good dinner upon the table than when his wife talks Greek." Samuel Johnson
  • "A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it." Aldous Huxley
  • "A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses." George Bernard Shaw
  • "A man's own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to anyone else." Anthony Trollope
  • "A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner; and if he cannot get that well dressed, he should be suspected of inaccuracy in other things." Samuel Johnson
  • "A man should not form the habit of drinking wine at midday; for when he drinks wine at midday, the consequence is that he neglects the study of the whole Torah." The Minor Tractates of the Talmud.
  • "A man should not so much respect what he eats, as with whom he eats." Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
  • "A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man." Sinclair Lewis
  • "A man taking basil from a woman will love her always." Sir Thomas Moore
  • "A man that lives on pork, fine-flour bread, rich pies and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee, and uses tobacco, might as well try to fly as to be chaste in thought." Dr. John Harvey Kellogg
  • "A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm." Anton Chekhov
  • "A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs." Clifton Fadiman
  • "A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother." Norman Douglas
  • "A man's palate can, in time, become accustomed to anything." Napoleon Bonaparte
  • "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." Paul Erdos
  • "A messy kitchen is a happy kitchen and this kitchen is delirious." Anonymous
  • "A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows." George Bernard Shaw
  • "A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” Tenneva Jordan
  • "A new British survey has revealed that 9 out of 10 people like chocolate. The tenth lies." Robert Paul
  • "A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat." Old New York Proverb
  • "A nickel's worth of goulash beats a five dollar can of vitamins." Martin H. Fischer
  • "A number of rare or newly experienced foods have been claimed to be aphrodisiacs. At one time this quality was even ascribed to the tomato. Reflect on that when you are next preparing the family salad." Jane Grigson
  • "A pasty costly-made,
    Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay,
    Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks
    Imbedded and injellied." Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  • "A pâté is nothing more than French meat loaf that's had a couple of cocktails." Carole Cutler
  • "A peasant will stand on the top of a hill for a very long time with his mouth open, before a roast duck will fly in." Anonymous
  • "A person who can get a good table at Chez Panisse at the last minute is a very important person indeed. Royalty begins with Alice Waters." Willard Spiegelman
  • "A pe"A pessimist is someone who looks at the land of milk and honey and sees only calories and cholesterol." Anonymous
  • "A pessimist is someone who looks at the land of milk and honey and sees only calories and cholesterol." Anonymous
  • "A philosopher is a person who doesn't care which side his bread is buttered on; he knows he eats both sides anyway." Joyce Brothers
  • "A plain gravy, a good bread sauce, game potatoes and for me all else is vanity. I suppose that if you were to be cast on a desert island on which to only food was partridge you might, after a year or so, begin to think about improvising a casserole and you would certainly miss the bread sauce, but I frankly cannot see why having evolved the perfect way to cook the perfect thing we should not sit back and be as smug, as conservative and as satisfied as we have a right to be." Rupert Croft-Cooke
  • "A plenitude of peanut butter and a dearth of hot mustard." Patrick Dean (on American food)
  • "A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere." W.H. Auden
  • "A porkchop in the kitchen is a porkchop; a porkchop in Proust is Proust." William Gaso
  • "A PROCLAMATION FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF COFFEE HOUSES: Whereas it is most apparent that the multitude of Coffee Houses of late years set up and kept within this Kingdom...and the great resort of idle and disaffected persons to them, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well for that many tradesmen and others, do herein misspend much of their time, which might and probably would be employed in and about their Lawful Calling and Affairs; but also for that in such houses...divers, false, malitious, and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of His Majesty's Government, and to the disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; his Majesty hath though it fit and necessary, that the said Coffee Houses be (for the Future) put down and suppressed..." King Charles II of England
  • "A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with -- even if he drank." H.L. Mencken
  • "A prune is a plum that has seen better days." Anonymous
  • "A raisin is a worried-looking grape." Anonymous
  • "A recipe is not meant to be followed exactly -- it is a canvas on which you can embroider." Roger Verge
  • "A restaurant is a fantasy -- a kind of living fantasy in which diners are the most important members of the cast." Warner LeRoy
  • "A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which the food comes." Wendell Berry
  • "A small amount of wine such as three or four glasses is of benefit for the preservation of the health of human beings and an excellent remedy for most illnesses." Maimonides
  • "A soup so thick you could shake its hand and stroll with it before dinner." Robert Crawford
  • "A stockbroker urged me to buy a stock that would triple its value every year. I told him, 'At my age, I don’t even buy green bananas.'" Claude Pepper
  • "A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle." Charles Baudelaire
  • "A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water." Lawrence Durrell (on olives)
  • "A three-year-old gave this reaction to her Christmas dinner: ‘I don't like the turkey, but I like the bread he ate.’" Author Unknown
  • "A tiny radish of passionate scarlet, tipped modestly in white." Clementine Paddleford
  • "A true gastronome should always be ready to eat, just as a soldier should always be ready to fight." Charles Pierre Monselet
  • "A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing but vegetables." Gertrude Stein
  • "A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children." David Brenner
  • "A waffle is like a pancake with a syrup trap." Mitch Hedberg
  • "A waist is a terrible thing to mind." Tom Wilson
  • "A well made sauce will make even an elephant or a grandfather palatable." Grimod de la Reyniere
  • "A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini." Bill Buford
  • "A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins." Laurie Colwin
  • "Abstain from beans. There be sundry interpretations of this symbol. But Plutarch and Cicero think beans to be forbidden of Pythagoras, because they be windy and do engender impure humours and for that cause provoke bodily lust." Richard Taverner
  • "Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult." Samuel Johnson
  • "According to the Spanish proverb, four persons are wanted to make a good salad: a spendthrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a counsellor for salt and a madman to stir it all up." John Gerard
  • "Acorns were good till bread was found." Francis Bacon
  • "Adam was but human -- this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden." Mark Twain
  • "After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed." Mark Twain
  • "After a perfect meal we are more susceptible to the ecstasy of love than at any other time." Dr. Hans Bazli
  • "After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of what women want. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate." Mel Gibson
  • "After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual 'food' out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps." Miss Piggy
  • "After dinner sit a while, and after supper walk a mile." English Saying
  • "After eating chocolate you feel godlike, as though you can conquer enemies, lead armies, entice lovers." Emily Luchetti
  • "After four martinis, my husband turns into a disgusting beast. And after the fifth, I pass out altogether." Anonymous
  • "Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone." Jim Fiebig
  • "Aioli epitomizes the heat, the power, and the joy of the Provencal sun, but it has another virtue -- it drives away flies." Frederic Mistral
  • “Alcohol is a good preservative for everything but brains.” Mary Pettibone Poole
  • "Alcohol is a liquid that can put the wreck into recreation." Anonymous
  • "Alcohol is a misunderstood vitamin." P.G. Wodehouse
  • "Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning." George Bernard Shaw
  • “Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed by the facts.” Finley Peter Dunne
  • "Alcohol is the prince of liquids and carries the palate to its highest pitch of exaltation." Brillat-Savarin
  • "Alcohol may pick you up a little bit, but it lets you down in a hurry." Betty Ford
  • "Alcohol removes inhibitions—like that scared little mouse who got drunk and shook his whiskers and shouted: 'Now bring on that damn cat!'" Eleanor Early
  • "All animals are strictly dry,
    They sinless live and swiftly die.
    But sinful, ginfull rum-soaked men
    Survive three score years and ten.
    And some of us -- though mighty few --
    Survive until we're ninety-two." Anonymous
  • "All cooking is a matter of time. In general, the more time the better." John Erskine
  • "All cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for." Andre Simon
  • "All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast." John Gunther
  • "All human history attests
    That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner!
    Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner." Lord Byron
  • "All I ask of food is that it doesn't harm me." Michael Palin
  • "All in all, I think the British actually hate food, otherwise they couldn't possibly abuse it so badly. Americans, on the other hand, love food but seldom care what it tastes like." Bill Marsano
  • "All knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost, in self defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature." Charles Dickens (on American meals)
  • "All millionaires love a baked apple." Ronald Firbank
  • "All normal people love meat. If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say, 'Yo Goober! Where's the meat?' I'm trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don't win friends with salad." Homer Simpson
  • "All of Bavaria can be divided into a small group of butchers and a larger group of people who look like butchers." Heimito von Doderer
  • "All sorrows are less with bread." Miguel de Cervantes
  • "All that changing of plates and flapping of napkins while you wait 40 minutes for your food." Hugh Casson (on London restaurants)
  • "All the best cooking is simple. There is really nothing new in it. I have 4,000 cookbooks dating back to 1503, and everything that is in nouvelle cuisine was there 200 years ago." Anton Mosimann
  • "All the great villainies of history, from the murder of Abel onward, have been perpetrated by sober men, chiefly by Teetotalers." H.L. Mencken
  • "All the ingenious men and all the scientific men in the world could never invent anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster." Charles Kingsley
  • "All the vitamins needed seem to be found in plebian dishes." William Feather
  • "All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt." Charles M. Schulz
  • "Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Als drait zich arum broit un toit (It all comes down to bread and death)." Yiddish proverb
  • "Although the frankfurter originated in Frankfurt, Germany, we have long since made it our own, a twin pillar of democracy along with Mom's apple pie. In fact, now that Mom's apple pie comes frozen and baked by somebody who isn't Mom, the hot dog stands alone. What it symbolizes remains pure, even if what it contains does not." William Zinsser
  • "Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That'll teach you to keep your mouth shut." Ernest Hemingway
  • "Always eat grapes downward -- that is eat the best grapes first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have a good grape in the lot." Samuel Butler
  • "Always serve too much hot fudge sauce on hot fudge sundaes. It makes people overjoyed, and puts them in your debt." Judith Olney
  • "America is now the fattest country in the world and getting fatter every day." unnamed H.J. Heinz Co. executive
  • "America knows nothing of food, love, or art." Isadora Duncan
  • "American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it." Dave Barry
  • "American Danish can be doughy, heavy, sticky, tasting of prunes and is usually wrapped in cellophane. Danish Danish is light, crisp, buttery and often tastes of marzipan or raisins; it is seldom wrapped in anything but loving care." R.W. Apple, Jr.
  • "Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before you do something else. Dinner is the evening." Art Buchwald
  • "Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce, Tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper, or any other condiment which destroys the original flavor of the dish." Henry Miller
  • "Americans may be drinking fewer alcoholic beverages, but they are certainly eating more of them than ever before. Wittingly or un." Marian Burros
  • "Americans, more than any other culture on earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family's cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of 'Fannie Farmer' or 'The Joy of Cooking'." John Thorne
  • “An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.” Dylan Thomas
  • "An apple is an excellent thing -- until you have tried a peach." George du Maurier
  • "An army marches on its stomach." Napoleon
  • "An egg is always an adventure; the next one may be different." Oscar Wilde
  • "An empty belly is the best cook." Estonian Proverb
  • “An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.” Albert Einstein
  • "An epicure is one who gets nothing better than the cream of everything but cheerfully makes the best of it." Oliver Herford
  • "An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools." Ernest Hemingway
  • "An old-fashioned vegetable soup, without any enhancement, is a more powerful anti-carcinogen than any known medicine." James Duke
  • "An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh." Will Rogers
  • "An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day." Irv Kupcinet
  • "An optimist is someone who goes after Moby Dick in a rowboat and takes the tartar sauce with him." John Silas “Zig” Ziglar
  • "An orange on the table, your dress on the rug, and you in my bed, sweet present of the present, cool of night, warmth of my life." Jaques Prevert
  • "An understanding of what food is and how cooking works does no violence to the art of cuisine, destroys no delightful mystery. Instead, the mystery expands from matters of expertise and taste to encompass the hidden patterns and wonderful coincidences of nature." Harold McGee
  • "And do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends." William Shakespeare
  • "And every day when I've been good,
    I get an orange after food." Robert Louis Stevenson
  • "And malt does more than Milton can; To justify God's ways to man" A.E. Housman
  • "And Mocha's berry, from Arabia pure,
    In small fine china cups, came in at last.
    Gold cups of filigree, made to secure the hand from burning,
    underneath them place.
    Cloves, cinnamon and saffron, too, were boiled
    Up with the coffee, which, I think, they spoiled." Lord Byron
  • "And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath." William Shakespeare
  • "And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
    Because I have a luncheon date." John Betjeman
  • "And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said -- God I hated that old man -- it said 'Chips with everything'. Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything." Arnold Wesker
  • "And then you bit onto them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything."Terry Pratchett
  • "And through the hall there walked to and fro
    A jolly yeoman, marshall of the same,
    Whose name was Appetite; he did bestow
    Both guestes and meate, whenever in they came,
    And knew them how to order without blame." Edmund Spenser
  • "And what shall I tell you, lady, of the natural secrets I have discovered while cooking? And I often say, when observing these details: had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more." Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
  • "And you stagger down to break your fast.
    Greasy bacon and lacquered eggs
    And coffee composed of frigid dregs." Ogden Nash
  • "And, of course, the funniest food of all: Kumquats." George Carlin
  • "Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink
    That is the finest of suppers, I think
    When I'm grown up and can have what I please,
    I think I shall always insist upon these." Christopher Morley
  • "Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends." George Bernard Shaw
  • "Another peculiarity of this country is the absence of napkins, even in the homes of the wealthy. Napkins, as a rule, are never used and one has to wipe one's mouth on the tablecloth, which in consequence suffers in appearance." Baron Louis de Closen (on American eating habits)
  • "Anti-alcoholics are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washing and scouring, and a drop of water added to a clear liquid like Absinthe, muddles it." Alfred Jarry
  • "Any fool can count the seeds in an apple. Only God can count all the apples in one seed." Robert Schuller
  • "Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry." Charles Baudelaire
  • "Any of us would kill a cow rather than not have beef." Samuel Johnson
  • "Any part of the piggy
    Is quite all right with me
    Ham from Westphalia, ham from Parma
    Ham as lean as the Dalai Lama
    Ham from Virginia, ham from York,
    Trotters Sausages, hot roast pork.
    Crackling crisp for my teeth to grind on
    Bacon with or without the rind on
    Though humanitarian
    I'm not a vegetarian.
    I'm neither crank nor prude nor prig
    And though it may sound infra dig
    Any part of the darling pig
    Is perfectly fine with me." Noel Coward
  • "Anybody can make you enjoy the first bite of a dish, but only a real chef can make you enjoy the last." François Minot
  • "Anybody who believes that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach flunked geography." Robert Byrne
  • "Anybody who hates dogs and loves whiskey can't be all bad." W.C. Fields
  • "Anyhow, the hole in the doughnut is at least digestible." H.L. Mencken
  • "Anyone who eats three meals a day should understand why cookbooks outsell sex books three to one." L. M. Boyd
  • "Anyone who uses the phrase 'easy as taking candy from a baby' has never tried taking candy from a baby." Unknown
  • "As for those grapefruit and buttermilk diets, I'll take roast chicken and dumplings." Hattie McDaniel
  • "Anything that's white is sweet; anything that's brown is meat; anything that's gray don't eat." Stephen Sondheim, on airplane food
  • "Anytime a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies." Milton Berle
  • "Appetite comes with eating." Francois Rabelais
  • "Appetite, a universal wolf." Shakespeare
  • "Appetizers are those little bits you eat until you lose your appetite." Anonymous
  • "Apple-pie is used through the whole year, and when fresh apples are no longer to be had, dried ones are used. It is the evening meal of children. House-pie, in country places, is made of apples neither peeled nor freed from their cores, and its crust is not broken if a wagon wheel goes over it." Dr. Acrelius
  • "Approaching the stove, she would don a voluminous apron, toss some meat on a platter, empty a skillet of its perfectly cooked a point vegetables, sprinkle a handful of chopped parsley over all, and then, like a proficient striptease artist, remove the apron, allowing it to fall to the floor with a shake of her hips." Bert Greene
  • "Aqua vitae was first used in this country, Ireland, as a medicine, considered as a panacea for all disorders, and the physicians recommended it to patients indiscriminately for preserving health, dissipating humours, strengthening the heart, curing colic, dropsy, palsy, quartan fever, stone, and even prolonging existence beyond the common limits." Morewood
  • "Around here, grillin's grillin' and barbecue is, well -- sigh, sweat -- what dinin' in heaven's got to be all about." Jane Garvey
  • "Artichoke: That vegetable of which one has more at the finish than at the start of dinner." Lord Chesterfield
  • "As a child my family's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it." Buddy Hackett
  • "As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings." George Orwell (on the English)
  • "As for bread, I count that for nothin'. We always have bread and potatoes enough; but I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel. Give me children that's raised on good sound pork afore all the game in the country. Game's good as a relish and so's bread; but pork is the staff of life... My children I calkerlate to bring up on pork with just as much bread and butter as they want." James Fenimore Cooper
  • "As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists." Joan Gussow
  • "As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy, and to make plans." Ernest Hemingway
  • "As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable -- until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!" Jack Handy
  • "As I ramble through life, whatever be my goal, I will unfortunately always keep my eye upon the doughnut and not upon the hole." Wendy Wasserstein
  • "As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing." Alice B. Toklas
  • "As long as you represent me as praising alcohol I shall not complain. It is, I believe, the greatest of human inventions, and by far -- much greater than Hell, the radio or the bichloride tablet." H.L. Mencken
  • "As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move... similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle." Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
  • "As the days grow short, some faces grow long. But not mine. Every autumn, when the wind turns cold and darkness comes early, I am suddenly happy. It's time to start making soup again." Leslie Newman
  • "As with most fine things, chocolate has its season. There is a simple memory aid that you can use to determine whether it is the correct time to order chocolate dishes: any month whose name contains the letter A, E, or U is the proper time for chocolate. " Sandra Boynton
  • "As you get older, you shouldn't waste time drinking bad wine." Julia Child
  • "Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch." Orson Welles
  • "Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts." Charles Lamb
  • "At 5:30 the morning shift of commissary workers arrive to stock the coffee urns, bring in fresh food and prepare for the daylong job of feeding the humans." Francis X. Clines (on the Bronx Zoo)
  • "At 73, no longer a god in the garden or a satyr in the forest, he is a wolf at table." Prince of Ligne (on Casanova)
  • "At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well and talk well but not too wisely." W. Somerset Maugham
  • "At high tide the fish eat ants; at low tide the ants eat fish." Thai Proverb
  • "At the beginning of the World God created wine for man’s health, since it is more precious than any other drink and more natural to him." Francesc Eiximenis
  • "Avoid fruit and nuts. You are what you eat." Jim Davis
  • “BACCHUS, n. A convenient deity invented by the ancients as an excuse for getting drunk.” Ambrose Bierce
  • "Bachelor's fare: bread and cheese, and kisses." Jonathan Swift
  • "Bad cooks -- and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen -- have delayed human development longest and impaired it most." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
  • “Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.” Socrates
  • "Bagels are made with love and a little cement." Anonymous
  • "Bait the hook well. This fish will bite." Shakespeare
  • "Baked apples are at the core of modern thinking." Naomi Kobuko
  • "Bakers of bread rolls and pastry cooks will not buy grain before eleven o'clock in winter and noon in summer; bakers of large loaves will not buy grain before two o'clock. This will enable the people of the town to obtain their supply first. Bakers shall put a distinctive trademark on their loaves, and keep weights and scales in their shops, under penalty of having their licenses removed." Cardinal Richelieu
  • "Banish (the onion) from the kitchen and the pleasure flies with it. Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest delicacy to hopeless insipidity, and dinner to despair." Elizabeth Robbins Pennell
  • "Banquet: a plate of cold, hairy chicken and artificially coloured green peas completely surrounded by dreary speeches and appeals for donations." Bennett A. Cerf
  • "Banquet: an affair where you eat a lot of food you don’t want before talking about something you don’t understand to a crowd of people who don’t want to hear." Unknown
  • "Be careful not to be the first to put your hands in the dish. What you cannot hold in your hands you must put on your plate. Also it is a great breach of etiquette when your fingers are dirty and greasy, to bring them to your mouth in order to lick them, or to clean them on your jacket. It would be more decent to use the tablecloth." Desiderius Erasmus
  • "Be careful of the words you say, keep them soft and sweet; You never know from day to day which ones you'll have to eat." Unknown
  • "Be careful to trust a person, who does not like wine" Karl Marx
  • "Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing else." Hillaire Belloc
  • "Be temperate in wine, in eating, girls & sloth; Or the Gout will seize you and plague you both." Benjamin Franklin
  • "Beans are highly nutritious and satisfying, they can also be delicious if and when properly prepared, and they posses over all vegetables the great advantage of being just as good, if not better, when kept waiting, an advantage in the case of people whose disposition or occupation makes it difficult for them to be punctual at mealtime." Andre Simon
  • "Bear in mind that you should conduct yourself in life as at a feast." Epictetus
  • "Beasts feed. Man eats. Only the man of intellect knows how to eat." Brillat-Savarin
  • "'Bee vomit,' my brother said once, 'that's all honey is,' so that I could not put my tongue to its jellied flame without tasting regurgitated blossoms." Rita Dove
  • "BEER: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." Homer Simpson
  • "Beer has long been the prime lubricant in our social intercourse and the sacred throat-anointing fluid that accompanies the ritual of mateship. To sink a few cold ones with the blokes is both an escape and a confirmation of belonging." Rennie Ellis
  • "Beer is made by men, Wine by God." Martin Luther
  • "Beer is not a good cocktail party drink, especially in a home where you don't know where the bathroom is." Billy Carter
  • "Beer is the Danish national drink, and the Danish national weakness is another beer." Clementine Paddleford
  • "Before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding." Samuel Johnson
  • "Before eating, always take a little time to thank the food." American Indian Proverb
  • "Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, 'In my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne -- the food of Aphrodite.'" Isadora Duncan
  • "Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and revealed to him the art of making le vin. By the aid of this liquid he unveiled more and more truth." Benjamin Franklin
  • "Being American is to eat a lot of beef steak, and boy, we've got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that's why you ought to be glad you're an American. And people have started looking at these big hunks of bloody meat on their plates, you know, and wondering what on Earth they think they're doing." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
  • "Being sober for so many years is getting interesting." Peter O'Toole
  • "Best way to get rid of kitchen odors: Eat out." Phyllis Diller
  • "Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear." Aesop
  • "Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it." Proverbs 15:17
  • "Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup." Wendell Berry
  • "Better that the belly burst than food be left on the table." Neapolitan proverb
  • "Between the ages of twenty and fifty, John Doe spends some twenty thousand hours chewing and swallowing food, more than eight hundred days and nights of steady eating. The mere contemplation of this fact is upsetting enough." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake." Anonymous
  • "Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love." Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (on coffee)
  • "Blessed be he that invented pudding, for it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people; a manna better than that of the wilderness, because the people are never weary of it." Francoise Maximilien Mission
  • "Boiled cabbage a l'Anglaise is something compared with which steamed coarse newsprint bought from bankrupt Finnish salvage dealers and heated over smoky oil stoves is an exquisite delicacy. " William Neil Connor (columnist "Cassandra")
  • "Brandy and water spoils two good things." Charles Lamb
  • "Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eating under a tree." Elizabeth Russell
  • "Bread deals with living things, with giving life, with growth, with the seed, the grain that nurtures. It is not coincidence that we say bread is the staff of life." Lionel Poilane
  • "Bread is a staple article of diet in theory, rather than in practice. There are few who are truly fond of bread in its simplest, most pure, and most healthful state.... Is there one person in a thousand who would truly enjoy a meal of simple bread of two days old?" William Andrus Alcott
  • "Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the court that surrounds the king. The countries are the soup, the meat, the vegetables, the salad... but bread is king." Louis Bromfield
  • "Bread is the warmest, kindest of words. Write it always with a capital letter, like your own name." Anonymous
  • "Bread that must be sliced with an axe is bread that is too nourishing." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Breakfast cereals that come in the same colors as polyester leisure suits make oversleeping a virtue." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Breaking a glass in the northwest is rather like belching in Arabia, for it appears to be done as a mark of appreciation or elation." Jonathan Aitken
  • "Brewing espresso...unlike other methods of brewing coffee...IS rocket science..." Kevin Knox and Julie Sheldon Huffaker
  • "Bright red meat is good for you. Fuzzy green meat is not good for you." seen on a bumper sticker
  • "Bring me an order of escargots, but hold the slugs." Orson Bean
  • "Britain is the only country in the world where the food is more dangerous than the sex." Jackie Mason
  • "Burgundy makes you think of silly things, Bordeaux makes you talk of them, and Champagne makes you do them." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "But beef is rare within these oxless isles;
    Goat's flesh there is, no doubt, and kid, and mutton;
    And, when a holiday upon them smiles,
    A joint upon their barbarous spits they put on." Lord Byron
  • "But doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age." William Shakespeare
  • "But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning." F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • "But I, when I undress me
    Each night, upon my knees
    Will ask the Lord to bless me
    With apple-pie and cheese." Eugene Field
  • "But since he stood for England
    And knew what England means,
    Unless you give him bacon
    You must not give him beans." G.K. Chesterton
  • "But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from... the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviar, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them." J.B. Priestley
  • "But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt... we dispatched it with great expedition." Herman Melville (in Moby Dick)
  • "But when the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface." Mark Twain
  • "By making this wine known to the public, I have rendered my country as great a service as if I had enabled it to pay back the national debt." Thomas Jefferson
  • "By reason of its soporigous quality, lettuce ever was, and still continues the principal foundation of the universal tribe of Sallets, which is to cool and refresh, besides its other properties... including beneficial influences on morals, temperance, and chastity." John Evelyn
  • "Cabbage as a food has problems. It is easy to grow, a useful source of greenery for much of the year. Yet as a vegetable it has original sin, and needs improvement. It can smell foul in the pot, linger through the house with pertinacity, and ruin a meal with its wet flab. Cabbage also has a nasty history of being good for you." Jane Grigson
  • "Cabbage is best after it is reheated seven times." Slovakian proverb
  • "Cabbage twice cooked is death." Greek proverb
  • "Cabbages, whose heads, tightly folded, see and hear nothing of this world, dreaming only on the yellow and green magnificence that is hardening within them." John Haines
  • "Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?" Plutarch
  • "Cantonese will eat anything in the sky but airplanes, anything in the sea but submarines and anything with four legs but the table." Amanda Bennett
  • "Carnation Milk is the best in the land
  • Here I sit with a can in my hand
    No teats to pull, no hay to pitch
    You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch." Unknown
  • "CARNIVOROUS, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous vegetarian, his heirs and assigns." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Carob is a brown powder made from the pulverized fruit of a Mediterranean evergreen. Some consider carob an adequate substitute for chocolate because it has some similar nutrients (calcium, phosphorus) and because it can, when combined with vegetable fat and sugar, be made to approximate the color and consistency of chocolate. Of course, the same argument can as persuasively be made in favor of dirt." Sandra Boynton
  • "Carve a ham as if you were shaving the face of a friend." Henri Charpentier
  • "Cassoulet, that best of bean feasts, is everyday fare for a peasant but ambrosia for a gastronome, though its ideal consumer is a 300-pound blocking back who has been splitting firewood nonstop for the last twelve hours on a subzero day in Manitoba." Julia Child
  • "Cat... the other white meat." seen on a bumper sticker
  • "Catering is the cottage industry of New York. All a caterer needs is a Cuisinart, some pots and pans and a couple of food magazines to start out. They get jobs, though they don't necessarily get repeats." Donald Bruce White
  • "Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education." Mark Twain
  • "Caviar is to dining what a sable coat is to a girl in evening dress." Ludwig Bemelmans
  • "Celery contributes to a stimulation of the digestion, but is also suspected to be somewhat sexually exciting or even straightforward arousing. These effects can be reduced by boiling. It is not a food for everybody." C.E. Hagdahl
  • "Central heating, French rubber goods and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man's ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and, of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Champagne and orange juice is a great drink. The orange improves the champagne. The champagne definitely improves the orange." Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh
  • "Cheese. The adult form of milk." Richard Condon
  • "Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Cheese is the biscuit of drunkards." John Keats
  • "Cheese that is compelled by law to append the word 'food' to its title does not go well with red wine or fruit." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Chef: Any cook who swears in French." Henry Beard and Roy McKie
  • "Chemically speaking, chocolate really is the world's perfect food." Michael Levine
  • "Chemicals, n: Noxious substances from which modern foods are made." Author Unknown
  • "“Chewing gum! A new and superior preparation of Spruce Gum.” "advertisement for the first commercial chewing gum; Chicago Daily Democrat, October 25, 1850
  • "Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy." William Shakespeare
  • "Chicken may be eaten constantly without becoming nauseating." Andre Simon
  • "Chili represents your three stages of matter: solid, liquid, and eventually gas." character Dan Conner, on Roseanne
  • "Chocolate is not only a pleasant of taste, but it is also a veritable balm of the mouth, for the maintaining of all glands and humours in a good state of health. Thus it is, that all who drink it, possess a sweet breath." Stephani Blancardi
  • "Chop: A piece of leather skillfully attached to a bone and administered to the patients at restaurants." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Chocolate, of course, is the stuff of which fantasies are made. Rich, dark, velvety-smooth fantasies that envelop the senses and stir the passions. Chocolate is madness; chocolate is delight." Judith Olney
  • "Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard." Spike Milligan
  • "Chowder breathes reassurance. It steams consolation." Clementine Paddleford
  • "Chutney is marvelous. I'm mad about it. To me, it's very imperial." Dianna Vreeland
  • "Clam chowder is one of those subjects, like politics or religion, that can never be discussed lightly. Bring it up even incidentally, and all the innumerable factions of the clam bake regions raise their heads and begin to yammer." Louis P. De Gouy
  • "Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men. But he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy." Samuel Johnson
  • "Classic Recipe for Roast Beef:
    1 large Roast of beef
    1 small Roast of beef
    Take the two roasts and put them in the oven.
    When the little one burns, the big one is done." Gracie Allen
  • "Clearly it is not the lovelorn sufferer who seeks solace in chocolate, but rather the chocolate-deprived individual, who, desperate, seeks in mere love a pale approximation of bittersweet euphoria." Sandra Boynton
  • "Cockroaches and socialites are the only things that can stay up all night and eat anything." Herb Caen
  • "Cocktails are society's most enduring invention!". Elsa Maxwell
  • "Coexistence... what the farmer does with the turkey -- until Thanksgiving." Mike Connolly
  • "Coffee and cigarettes, you know? That's, like, the breakfast of champions." Jim Jarmusch, in "Blue in the Face"
  • "Coffee isn't my cup of tea." Samuel Goldwyn
  • "Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water." The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674
  • "Coffee: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party it is taken standing up. Take it without sugar -- very swank: gives the impression you have lived in the East." Edward VII
  • "Coffee: we can get it anywhere, and get as loaded as we like on it, until such teeth-chattering, eye-bulging, nonsense-gibbering time as we may be classified unable to operate heavy machinery." Joan Frank
  • "Cold soup is a very tricky thing and it is the rare hostess who can carry it off. More often than not the dinner guest is left with the impression that had he only come a little earlier he could have gotten it while it was still hot." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love." Song of Solomon 2:5
  • "Condensed milk is wonderful. I don't see how they can get a cow to sit down on those little cans." Fred Allen
  • "CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else. An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine was poured on his lips to revive him. "Pauillac, 1873," he murmured and died." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it." Umberto Eco
  • "Conversation is the enemy of food and good wine." Alfred Hitchcock
  • "Condiments are like old friends -- highly thought of, but often taken for granted." Marilyn Kaytor
  • "Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother's." Andrei Codrescu
  • "Cookery is an old art, as it goes back to Adam." Marquis de Cussy
  • "Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen." Robert Burton
  • "Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements." Marcel Boulestin
  • "Cookery is the art of preparing food for the nourishment of the body. Prehistoric man may have lived on uncooked foods, but there are no savage races today who do not practice cookery in some way, however crude. Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery." Fannie Merritt Farmer
  • "Cookery means... much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality; and... it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies -- loaf givers." John Ruskin
  • "Cookies are made of butter and love." Norwegian Proverb
  • "Cooking is a creation. As a creation, it is a personalized view of the way we like to express our feelings. It is how we share our sense of art, our knowledge, and our taste with other people. Food, after all, is not merely a product. It is necessary to our sustenance. Food is the support of life and is the center of the way we live when we take a moment to sit down and share life, share conversation, and share joy. That is the joy of cooking, which is a cliche, and yet is it the ultimate way we really fulfill ourselves and those around us. When people come to us and reach out to us, we must reach out with a very personalized and individual way of expressing our beliefs." Piero Selvaggio
  • "Cooking is a lot like making love. It just takes a little longer to clean up." Michael Tucker
  • "Cooking is an art and patience a virtue... Careful shopping, fresh ingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing -- love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist -- not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naive, or Van Gogh, the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love." Keith Floyd
  • "Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food." Craig Claiborne
  • "Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all." Harriet Van Horne
  • "Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life." Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "Cooking Rule... If at first you don't succeed, order pizza." Anonymous
  • "Cooking saved my life! Sure, there were some miserable moments, but that was sort of the point, to find something challenging and consuming enough to take a place in the center of my life into which was creeping a horrible feeling of stasis and the doom of mediocrity." Julie Powell
  • "Cooking Tip: Wrap turkey leftovers in aluminum foil and throw them out." Nicole Hollander
  • "Cooks are in some ways very much like actors; they must be fit and strong, since acting and cooking are two of the most exacting professions. They must be blessed -- or cursed, whichever way you care to look at it -- with what is called the artistic temperament, which means that if they are to act or cook at all well, it cannot be for duds or dummies." Andre Simon
  • "Crabs walk sideways to keep from tripping over their own legs. Having ten legs, eight for walking and two pincers for picking up food, crabs have too many limbs to sort out in order to walk straight forward." from a trivia collection
  • "CRAYFISH, n. A small crustacean very much resembling the lobster, but less indigestible." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Cuisine is only about making foods taste the way they are supposed to taste." Charlie Trotter
  • "Cuisine is when things taste like themselves." Curnonsky
  • "Custard: A detestable substance produced by a malevolent conspiracy of the hen, the cow and the cook." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Cutting stalks at noontime. Perspiration drips to the earth. Know you that your bowl of rice each grain from hardship comes?" Chang Chan-Pao
  • "Dear gourmands! my bowels yearn towards them as a father's toward his children. They are so good natured! They have such sparkling eyes!" Brillat-Savarin
  • "Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family." Berke Breathed
  • "DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Deliberation, n. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner." William Thackeray
  • "Dessert is probably the most important stage of the meal, since it will be the last thing your guests remember before they pass out all over the table." The Anarchist Cookbook
  • "Destruction lurks within the poisonous dose, a fatal fever or a purpled nose." Soame Jenyns (on drinking)
  • "Dietetic meals are like an opera without the orchestra." Paul Bocuse
  • "Diets are for those who are thick and tired of it." Unknown
  • "Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely." Isabella Beeton
  • "Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism. Such evenings cannot fail to diminish those who take part in them. They end on Monkey Hill." Cyril Connolly
  • "Dinner was made for eating, not for talking." William Makepeace Thackeray
  • "Do give books for Christmas. They're never fattening..." Lenore Hershey
  • "Do not be afraid of simplicity. If you have a cold chicken for supper, why cover it with a tasteless white sauce which makes it look like a pretentious dish on the buffet table at some fancy dress ball?" Marcel Boulestin
  • "Do not be afraid to talk about food. Food which is worth eating is worth discussing. And there is the occult power of words which somehow will develop its qualities." Marcel Boulestin
  • "Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?" Unknown
  • "Do you have a kinder, more adaptable friend in the food world than soup? Who soothes you when you are ill? Who refuses to leave you when you are impoverished and stretches its resources to give a hearty sustenance and cheer? Who warms you in the winter and cools you in the summer? Yet who also is capable of doing honor to your richest table and impressing your most demanding guests? Soup does its loyal best, no matter what undignified conditions are imposed upon it. You don't catch steak hanging around when you're poor and sick, do you?" Judith Martin
  • "Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!" Roald Dahl
  • "Doctor, do you think it could have been the sausage?" last words of Paul Claudel
  • "Doing strange things in the name of art, and stranger things in the name of chocolate." Christina M. Callihan
  • "Don't eat too many almonds; they add weight to the breasts." Colette
  • "Don't forget that the flavors of wine and cheese depend upon the types of infecting micro-organisms." Martin H. Fischer
  • "Don't hit the person across from you with bits of toast, And don't, when dinner is nearly through, say 'Who's the host' It isn't done." Cole Porter
  • "Don't let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine." Anthony Trollope
  • "Don't take a butcher's advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he'd be a chef." Andy Rooney
  • "Don’t wreck a sublime chocolate experience by feeling guilty. Chocolate isn't like pre-marital sex. It will not make you pregnant. And it always feels good." Laura Brody
  • "Drink a glass of wine after your soup and you steal a ruble from your doctor." Russian proverb
  • "Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities." I Timothy 5:23
  • "Drink to me only with thine eyes,
    And I will pledge with mine;
    Or leave a kiss but in the cup
    And I'll not look for wine." Ben Jonson
  • "Drink wine every day, at lunch and dinner, and the rest will take care of itself." Waverly Root
  • "Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony." Robert Benchley
  • "Drunkenness is deplorably destructive, but her demurer sister Gluttony destroys a hundred to her one." William Kitchiner
  • "Dulce de leche is a culinary cry for help. It says ‘save us, we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don’t know what to do for dessert and we’re going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives.’" Maciej Ceglowski
  • "Dyspepsia is the remorse of a guilty stomach." A. Kerr
  • "Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky." Italo Calvino
  • "EAT, v.i. To perform successively (and successfully) the functions of mastication, humectation, and deglutition. ‘I was in the drawing-room, enjoying my dinner,’ said Brillat-Savarin, beginning an anecdote. ‘What!’ interrupted Rochebriant; "eating dinner in a drawing-room?’ ‘I must beg you to observe, monsieur,’ explained the great gastronome, ‘that I did not say I was eating my dinner, but enjoying it. I had dined an hour before.’" Ambrose Bierce
  • "Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." Unknown
  • "Eat as much as you like -- just don't swallow it." Steve Burns
  • "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." Adelle Davis
  • "Eat butter first, and eat it last, and live till a hundred years be past." Old Dutch proverb
  • "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow they may make it illegal." Anonymous
  • "Eat little, sleep sound." Iranian Proverb
  • "Eat nothing that will prevent you from eating." Ibn Tibbon
  • "Eat standing, eat walking." Samoan Proverb
  • [eat the pie]"while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of candied juice along the edges, (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its own lips watered!) of a mild and modest warmth, the sugar suggesting jelly, yet not jellied, the morsels of apple neither dissolved nor yet in original substance, but hanging as it were in a trance between the spirit and the flesh of applehood...then, O blessed man, favored by all the divinities! eat, give thanks, and go forth, 'in apple-pie order!'" Rev. Henry Ward Beecher
  • "Eat until the lips protrude." Filipino Proverb
  • "Eat what is cooked; listen to what is said." Russian Proverb
  • "Eating alone is your privilege but remember your pain will be even greater." Congolese proverb
  • "Eating an artichoke is like getting to know someone really well." Willi Hastings
  • "Eating and mating are human instincts." Vietnamese Proverb
  • "Eating at a new, highly recommended restaurant is like a Very Important Blind Date, a contract with uncertainty you enter into with great expectation battling the cynicism of experience. You sit waiting, wondering about the upcoming moments of revelation. Somewhere in the back of your head is the dour warning that disappointment is inevitable but you don't really believe it or you wouldn't be there. The best eaters are always optimists." Stuart Stevens
  • "Eating food with a knife and fork is like making love through an interpreter." Anonymous
  • "Eating highly seasoned food is unhealthful, because it stimulates too much, provokes the appetite too much, and often is indigestible." Catharine E. Beecher
  • "Eating is Heaven." Korean Proverb
  • "Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale." Elsa Schiaparelli
  • "Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling." Dave Barry
  • "Eating takes a special talent. Some people are much better at it than others. In that way, it is like sex, and as with sex, it's more fun with someone who really likes it. I can't imagine having a lasting friendship with anyone who is not interested in food." Alan King
  • "EDIBLE (adj). Good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Eggs are very much like small boys. If you overheat them or over beat them, they will turn on you and no amount of future love will right the wrong." Irena Chalmers
  • "Eggs of an hour, bread of a day, wine of a year, a friend of thirty years." Italian Proverb
  • "England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy." Katherine Mansfield
  • "English Cooking: You just put things in hot water and take them out again after a while." Anonymous French Chef
  • "English wine is like Belgian rock or German disco: a waste of everyone's time and money." Jay Rayner
  • "Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is honour." Emily Post
  • "EUCHARIST, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi. A dispute once unhappily arose among the members of this sect as to what it was that they ate. In this controversy some five hundred thousand have already been slain, and the question is still unsettled." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn't have the anxiety that we'd starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know? And our own hogs, and our own cows and stuff, you know." James Earl Jones
  • "Even now, when I do a slide show of the Geek Squad story, the first slide is a photo of ramen noodles. Because for me, ramen noodles are the international symbol for struggle." Robert Stephens
  • "Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Ever since Eve started it all by offering Adam the apple, woman’s punishment has been to supply a man with food then suffer the consequences when it disagrees with him." Helen Rowland
  • "Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want. I used to think that the notoriously bad cooking of the English was an example to the contrary, and that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it." Waverly Root
  • "Every man will have to give an account of himself for every good thing which he would have liked to eat, but did not." Hillel
  • "Every morning one must start from scratch with nothing on the stove. This is cuisine!" Larousse Gastronomique
  • "Every sweet has its sour." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "Everybody loves to have things which please the palate put in their way, without trouble or preparation." Samuel Johnson
  • "Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology." Clive James
  • "Everyone must believe in something, I believe I'll have another drink." WC Fields
  • "Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking." Victor Hugo
  • "Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don't eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on." George Bernard Shaw
  • "Everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted his name to become a term of opprobrium?" Grimod de la Reyniere
  • "Excellent potatoes, smoking hot, and accompanied by melted butter of the first quality, would alone stamp merit on any dinner." Thomas Walker
  • "Exercise is a dirty word. Every time I hear it I wash my mouth out with chocolate." Charles M. Schultz
  • "Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor." Truman Capote
  • "FAME is a fickle food
    Upon a shifting plate,
    Whose table once a Guest, but not
    The second time, is set.
    Whose crumbs the crows inspect,
    And with ironic caw
    Flap past it to the Farmer's corn;
    Men eat of it and die." Emily Dickinson
  • "Fame is a food that dead men eat.
    I have no stomach for such meat." Henry Austin Dobson
  • "Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters." M.F.K Fisher
  • "Fast food doesn't satisfy your appetite, it just kills it." Tom Fitzmorris
  • FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Feast, and your halls are crowded; fast, and the world goes by." Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  • "Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults." Mitch Hedberg
  • "Few things are more revolting than the spectacle of a normally reasonable father and husband gowned in one of those hot, massive aprons inscribed with disgustingly corny legends, presiding over a noisome brazier as he destroys huge hunks of good meat and fills the neighborhood with greasy, acrid smoke: a Boy Scout with five o'clock shadow." NY Herald Tribune, 1961
  • "Filled with mingled cream and amber I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber Through the chambers of my brain -- Quaintest thoughts -- queerest fancies Come to life and fade away; Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today." Edgar Allan Poe
  • "First need in the reform of hospital management? That's easy! The death of all dietitians, and the resurrection of a French chef." Martin H. Fischer
  • "First then to speak of sallets, there be some simple, some compounded, some only to furnish out the table, and some both for use and adoration." Gervaise Markham
  • "First we eat, then we do everything else." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is." P. J. O'Rourke
  • "Fish should smell like the tide. Once they smell like fish, it's too late." Oscar Gizelt
  • "Fish should swim thrice: first it should swim in the sea….then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret." Jonathan Swift
  • "Fishes considered as a food, make a considerable addition to the furniture of the table. " Thomas Best
  • "Fish, to taste right, must swim three times - in water, in butter, and in wine." Polish Proverb
  • "Following the Jewish tradition, a dispenser of schmaltz (liquid chicken fat) is kept on the table to give the vampires heartburn if they get through the garlic defense." Calvin Trillin
  • "Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented." Joyce Carol Oates
  • "Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing." Walt Kelly
  • "Food history is as important as a baroque church. Governments should recognize cultural heritage and protect traditional foods. A cheese is as worthy of preserving as a sixteenth-century building." Carlo Petrini
  • "Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture." Mark Kurlansky
  • "Food is an implement of magic, and only the most coldhearted rationalist could squeeze the juices of life out of it and make it bland. In a true sense, a cookbook is the best source of psychological advice and the kitchen the first choice of room for a therapy of the world." Thomas More
  • "Food is an important part of a balanced diet." Fran Leibowitz
  • "Food is of and from a place; it needs a context to give it authenticity. A dish that comes from nowhere lacks weight, lacks resonance." Colman Andrews
  • "Food is our common ground, a universal experience." James Beard
  • "Food is the most primitive form of comfort." Sheila Graham
  • "Food is to eat, not to frame and hang on the wall." William Denton (on nouvelle cuisine)
  • "Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well matched they are as body and soul, living partners." Andre Simon
  • "Food, like a loving touch or a glimpse of divine power, has that ability to comfort." Norman Kolpas
  • "Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups." Cathy Guisewite
  • "Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction." John Cage
  • "Food: Part of the spiritual expression of the French, and I do not believe that they have ever heard of calories." Beverley Baxter
  • "For a bad night, a mattress of wine." Spanish proverb
  • "For each glass, liberally large, the basic ingredients begin with ice cubes in a shaker and three or four drops of Angostura bitters on the ice cubes. Add several twisted lemon peels to the shaker, then a bottle-top of dry vermouth, a bottle-top of Scotch, and multiply the resultant liquid content by five with gin, preferably Bombay Sapphire. Add more gin if you think it is too bland... I have been told, but have no personal proof that it is true, that three of these taken in the course of an evening make it possible to fly from New York to Paris without an airplane." Isaac Stern
  • "For many a pasty have you robbed of blood,
    And many a Jack of Dover have you sold
    That has been heated twice and twice grown cold.
    From many a pilgrim have you had Christ's curse,
    For of your parsley they yet fare the worse,
    Which they have eaten with your stubble goose;
    For in your shop full many a fly is loose." Geoffrey Chaucer
  • "For the first time I know what it is to eat. I have gained four pounds. I get frantically hungry, and the food I eat gives me a lingering pleasure. I never ate before in this deep carnal way... I want to bite into life and to be torn by it." Anaïs Nin
  • "For this is every cook's opinion,
    No savoury dish without an onion;
    But lest your kissing should be spoiled,
    Your onions should be thoroughly boiled." Jonathan Swift
  • "Forget love... I'd rather fall in chocolate!" Author Unknown
  • "Fork: An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Friends are like melons. Shall I tell you why? To find one good you must a hundred try." Claude Mermet
  • "FROG, n. A reptile with edible legs." Ambrose Bierce
  • "From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting…On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain." E. B. White
  • "From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside who are lunching on Spa Cobb salads without blue cheese or dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both the sourdough roll and the cheese stick." Ann Patchett
  • "From wine... what sudden friendship springs!" John Gay
  • "Frying gives cooks numerous ways of concealing what appeared the day before and in a pinch facilitates sudden demands, for it takes little more time to fry a four-pound carp than to boil an egg." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "FRYING-PAN, n. One part of the penal apparatus employed in that punitive institution, a woman's kitchen. The frying-pan was invented by Calvin, and by him used in cooking span-long infants that had died without baptism; and observing one day the horrible torment of a tramp who had incautiously pulled a fried babe from the waste-dump and devoured it, it occurred to the great divine to rob death of its terrors by introducing the frying-pan into every household in Geneva. Thence it spread to all corners of the world, and has been of invaluable assistance in the propagation of his sombre faith." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Gardens, scholars say, are the first sign of commitment to a community. When people plant corn they are saying, let's stay here. And by their connection to the land, they are connected to one another." Anne Raver
  • "Garlic is as good as ten mothers." Les Blank
  • "Garlic is the 'vanilla' of Provence." French proverb
  • "Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke." Thomas Nash
  • "Garnishing of dishes has also a great deal to do with the appearance of a dinner-table, each dish garnished sufficiently to be in good taste without looking absurd." Hugo Ziemann
  • "Gazing at the typewriter in moments of desperation I console myself with three thoughts. Alcohol at six, dinner at eight, and to be immortal you've got to be dead." Gyles Brandreth
  • "Giin khao reu yang? (have you eaten rice yet?)" Traditional Thai greeting
  • "Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him of the entire weekend." Zenna Schaffer (and several other women)
  • "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak." Jay Leno
  • "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks!" Arisa Hosaka, Takayuki Ikkaku, and Toshihiro Kawabata
  • "Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll buy a funny hat. Talk to a hungry man about fish, and you're a consultant." Scott Adams
  • "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you will not have to listen to his incessant whining about how hungry he is." Anonymous
  • "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you can sell him fishing equipment." Anonymous
  • "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks." Anonymous
  • "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he will sit in the boat and drink beer all day." OldFox
  • "Give me a platter of choice finnan haddie, freshly cooked in its bath of water and milk, add melted butter, a slice or two of hot toast, a pot of steaming Darjeeling tea, and you may tell the butler to dispense with the caviar, truffles and nightingales' tongues." Craig Claiborne
  • "Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know." John Keats
  • "Give me the provisions and whole apparatus of a kitchen, and I would starve." Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
  • "Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts." Proverbs 31:6
  • “Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.” Shakespeare, Henry V, III, 7
  • "Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with... Give us pasta with a hundred fillings." Robert Farrar Capon
  • "Given the clientele, the restaurants on Capri might resemble those fancy Northern Italian places on the East Side of Manhattan where the captain has taken bilingual sneering lessons from the maitre d’ at the French joint down the street and the waiter, whose father was born in Palermo, would deny under torture that tomato sauce has ever touched his lips." Calvin Trillin
  • "GLUTTON, n. A person who escapes the evils of moderation by committing dyspepsia." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Gluttony is a lust of the mind." Thomas Hobbes
  • "Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign that something is eating us." Peter De Vries
  • "Gluttony is not a secret vice." Orson Wells
  • "Goat cheese... produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth." Russell Baker
  • "God bless my soul! No apple pie." Robert Oliver
  • "God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them." Franz Kafka
  • "God made only water, but man made wine." Victor Hugo
  • "Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness." Jane Austen
  • "Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts." James Beard
  • "Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel." General Booth
  • "Good cooking is when things taste of what they are." Curnonsky
  • "Good for diseases of the liver and to make blood. A decoction of the leaves and branches of Sage made and drunk, saith Dioscorides, provokes urine and causeth the hair to become black. It stayeth the bleeding of wounds and cleaneth ulcers and sores. Three spoonsful of the juice of Sage taken fasting with a little honey arrests spitting or vomiting of blood in consumption. It is profitable for all pains in the head coming of cold rheumatic humours, as also for all pains in the joints, whether inwardly or outwardly. The juice of Sage in warm water cureth hoarseness and cough. Pliny saith it cureth stinging and biting serpents. Sage is of excellent use to help the memory, warming and quickening the senses. The juice of Sage drunk with vinegar hath been of use in the time of the plague at all times. Gargles are made with Sage, Rosemary, Honeysuckles and Plantains, boiled in wine or water with some honey or alum put thereto, to wash sore mouths and throats, as need requireth. It is very good for stitch or pains in the sides coming of wind, if the place be fomented warm with the decoction in wine and the herb also, after boiling, be laid warm thereto." Nicholas Culpepper
  • "Good Hock (Hochheimer) keeps off the Doc." Queen Victoria
  • "Good Manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup." Bennett Cerf
  • "Good taste [in cooking] is innate, and knowing with certainty when and how to break the rules -- and when not to -- is a talent few possess." Michael McLaughlin
  • "Good Whisky, as a beverage, is the most wholesome spirit in the world." A. Barnard
  • "Good wine is a necessity of life for me." Thomas Jefferson
  • "Govern well thy appetite, lest Sin Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death." John Milton
  • "Governing a great nation is much like cooking a small fish." Lao Zi
  • "Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great." Henry IV of France
  • "Great food is like great sex. The more you have the more you want." Gael Greene
  • "Grilling, broiling, barbecuing -- whatever you want to call it -- is an art, not just a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach." James Beard
  • "Grub first, then ethics." Bertolt Brecht
  • "Half the cookbooks tell you how to cook the food and the other half tell you how to avoid eating it." Andy Rooney
  • "Half of the receipts in our cookbooks are mere murder to such constitutions and stomachs as we grow here. ...in America, owing to our brighter skies and more fervid climate, we have developed an acute, nervous delicacy of temperament far more akin to that of France than of England." Catherine Beecher
  • "Ham's substantial, ham is fat.
    Ham is firm and sound.
    Ham's what God was getting at
    When He made pigs so round." Roy Blount, Jr.
  • "Happiness is a bowl of cherries and a book of poetry under a shade tree." Astrid Alauda
  • "Happy and successful cooking doesn't rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life." Georges Blanc
  • "Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate, from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration." Charles Dudley Warner
  • "HASH: There is no definition for this word -- nobody knows what hash is. " Ambrose Bierce
  • "Having a good wife and rich cabbage soup, seek not other things." Russian Proverb
  • "having examined
    three thousand haiku poems --
    two persimmons" Masaoka Shiki
  • "He added that a Frenchman in the train had given him a great sandwich that so stank of garlic that he had been inclined to throw it at the fellow's head." Ford Maddox Ford
  • "He chopped up peppers, mixed them with vinegar and Avery Island salt, put the mixture in wooden barrels to age and funneled the resulting sauce into secondhand cologne bottles." James Conaway (on the invention of Tabasco)
  • "He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions." Charles Dickens
  • "He gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle." Ring Lardner
  • "He had never himself tasted alcohol in his life, until he arrived in Bangkok, and he found in 20 years' experience that the men and the women who died of cholera or dysentery were teetotallers."The Journal of the Siam Society, 1904
  • "He is a heavy eater of beef. Me thinks it doth harm to his wit." Shakespeare
  • "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." Raymond Chandler
  • "He may live without books - what is knowledge but grieving?
    He may live without hope - what is hope but deceiving?
    He may live without love - what is passion but pining?
    But where is the man who can live without dining?" Edward Bulwer-Lytton
  • "He receives comfort like cold porridge." William Shakespeare
  • "He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart." C.S. Lewis
  • "He that eateth well drinketh well,
    he that drinketh well sleepeth well,
    he that sleepeth well sinneth not,
    he that sinneth not goeth straight through Purgatory to Paradise." William Lithgow
  • "He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician." Chinese proverb
  • "He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected." Samuel Johnson
  • "He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato." Michael Ondaatje
  • "He was a very valiant man who first adventured on eating oysters." James I
  • "He was an innovator, an experimenter, a missionary in bringing the gospel of good cooking to the home table." Craig Claiborne (on James Beard)
  • "He was for all the world like a forked radish with a head fantasically carved upon it with a knife." Shakespeare
  • "He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise." Henry David Thoreau
  • “He who eats alone chokes alone.” Arab Proverb
  • "He whose belly is full believes not him who is fasting." Japanese proverb
  • "He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery. It fascinated people. They sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures. And sometime, when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination. But at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips, if it was well done, and maybe had a slice of tomato." Terry Pratchett
  • "Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better." Robert Redford
  • "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing." Redd Foxx
  • "Heart attacks... God's revenge for eating his little animal friends." Anonymous
  • "Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling." Herman Melville
  • "Hell is probably quite similar to most Paris bistros ... a bit overheated, somewhat too crowded, and a little too noisy for my tastes. The waiters will surely treat you rudely and the cashiers will always add a few extra francs to your bill but ... and this is the important part ... the food will be marvelous." Henry Miller
  • "Here is a kitchen improvement, in return for Peacock. For roasting or basting a chicken, render down your fat or butter with cider: about a third cider. Let it come together slowly, till the smell of cider and the smell of fat are as one. This will enliven even a frozen chicken." Sylvia Townsend Warner
  • "Here is a rural fellow that will not be denied your Highness' presence: he brings you figs." Shakespeare
  • "Hey, who took the cork off my lunch?" W.C. Fields
  • "High-tech tomatoes. Mysterious milk. Supersquash. Are we supposed to eat this stuff? Or is it going to eat us?" Annita Manning
  • "His idea of heaven is eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets." Sydney Smith
  • "History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive. It knows the names of the king's bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly." Jean-Henri Fabre
  • "Home grown tomatoes, home grown tomatoes
    What would life be like without homegrown tomatoes
    Only two things that money can't buy
    That's true love and home grown tomatoes." Guy Clark
  • "Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared--with a flask of wine--between working people, can be more convivial than any feast." Patience Gray
  • "Honest bread is very well -- it's the butter that makes the temptation." Douglas Jerrold
  • "Honey comes out of the air … At early dawn the leaves of trees are found bedewed with honey. … Whether this is the perspiration of the sky or a sort of saliva of the stars, or the moisture of the air purging itself, nevertheless it brings with it the great pleasure of its heavenly nature. It is always of the best quality when it is stored in the best flowers." Pliny
  • "Hors d’Oeuvre: A ham sandwich cut into forty pieces." Jack Benny
  • "Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me: they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like -- and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeurves." Saki
  • "Hospitality: The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging." Ambrose Bierce
  • "How about slipping out of those wet things and into a dry Martini?" Noel Coward
  • "How beautiful would be drinking pure water, if it just was a sin!" Italian proverb
  • "How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?" Julia Child
  • "How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to the young?" Paul Sweeney
  • "How can one make friends without exquisite dishes! It is mainly through the table that one governs." Jean-Jacques Regis de Cambaceres
  • "How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't understand." Jeff Smith
  • "How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than 60 years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?" Logan Smith
  • "How can you eat anything with eyes?" Will Kellogg
  • "How come when you mix water and flour together you get glue ... and then you add eggs and sugar and you get cake? Where does the glue go?" Rita Rudner
  • "How do they taste? They taste like more." H.L. Mencken
  • "How many flowers there are which only serve to produce essences, which could have been made into savory dishes." Charles Monselet
  • "How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness, is a simple heart." Nikos Kazantzakis
  • "How simple life is. We buy a fish. We are fed.
    We sit close to each other, we talk and then we go to bed." Gary Johnson
  • "How sweet the butter our own hands have churned." Charles Reade
  • "Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence." Rainer Maria Rilke
  • "Human beings do not eat nutrients, they eat food." Mary Catherine Bateson
  • "Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner." Douglas Adams
  • "Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs." P. J. O'Rourke
  • "Hunger finds no fault with the cookery." Henry George Bohn
  • "Hunger is never delicate." Samuel Johnson
  • "Hunger is the best sauce in the world." Cervantes
  • "Hunger makes you restless. You dream about food -- not just any food, but perfect food, the best food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother's milk singing to your bloodstream." Dorothy Allison
  • "Hunger: One of the few cravings that cannot be appeased with another solution." Irwin Van Grove
  • "Hungry men think the cook lazy." Anonymous
  • "I always ask at once, 'Do you drink?' and if she says 'No,' I bow politely and say I am sorry but I fear she will not suit. All good cooks drink." James Abbott McNeill Whistler
  • "I always plan dinner first thing in the morning. That's the only way I can get through the day, having a specific meal to look forward to at night." Alan King
  • "I always wondered why babies spend so much time sucking their thumbs. Then I tasted baby food." Robert Orben
  • "I am a strong partisan of second causes, and I believe firmly that the entire gallinaceous order (fowl) has been merely created to furnish our larders and our banquets." Brillat-Savarin
  • "I am convinced that digestion is the great secret of life." Sydney Smith
  • "I am eating like a fucking vegan with a wheat allergy and a weaknesss for skinless boneless chicken breasts, and I would like to say to you all now that while I have always found vegetarians a bit silly, since I have been eating like one my contempt for them is boundless. Jesus, what a boring, sad life it is. Wouldn’t be so bad, if you’d just throw in some fucking bacon. Or a steak." Julie Powell
  • "I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you don't know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch." Emily Dickinson
  • "I am not a glutton; I am an explorer of food." Erma Bombeck
  • "I am not strict vegan, because I'm a hedonist pig. If I see a big chocolate cake that is made with eggs, I'll have it." Grace Slick
  • "I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants." A. Whitney Brown
  • "I am prepared to believe that a dry martini slightly impairs the palate, but think what it does for the soul." Alec Waugh
  • "I am ready to defend the right of the tasty crab, the luscious oyster, the noble rockfish and the incomparable terrapin to continue their part in the penitential practice of Friday." Lawrence Cardinal Shehan, Archbishop of Baltimore
  • "I am still convinced that a good, simple, homemade cookie is preferable to all the store-bought cookies one can find." James Beard
  • "I am the emperor of Germany, but you are the emperor of chefs." Emperor William II of Germany (to Georges-Auguste Escoffier)
  • "I am utterly against those confused Olios, into which men put almost all kinds of meats and Roots." John Evelyn
  • "I appreciate the potato only as a protection against famine, except for that, I know of nothing more eminently tasteless." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "I asked the waiter for a dozen Portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there ... As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I ... began to be happy and to make plans." Ernest Hemingway
  • "I believe that I once considerably scandalised her by declaring that a clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience." Saki (H.H.Munro)
  • "I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around." James Beard
  • "I believe that if you don't want to do anything, then sit there and don't do it, but don't expect people to hand you a corn beef sandwich and wash your socks for you and unzip your fly for you." Shel Silverstein
  • "I bet you think an egg is something you casually order for breakfast when you can't think of anything else. Well, so did I once, but that was before the egg and I." Claudine Colbert
  • "I can recommend switching to chocolate for all you addictive types ...Think of the advantages ...Chocolate doesn't make you stupid and clumsy. It doesn't render you incapable of operating heavy machinery ...You don't have to smuggle chocolate across the border ...Possession, even possession with intent to sell, is perfectly legal ...and second-hand chocolate doesn't offend the people around you." Linda Henley
  • "I come from a family where gravy is considered a beverage." Erma Bombeck
  • "I come from food the way some people come from money. Food was the medium I grew up in, what we talked about, what shaped our days." Elizabeth McCracken
  • "I confess that nothing frightens me more than the appearance of mushrooms on the table, especially in a small provincial town." Alexandre Dumas
  • "I consider the discovery of a dish which sustains our appetite and prolongs our pleasures as a far more interesting event than the discovery of a star." Henrion de Pensey
  • "I crawled into the vegetable bin, settled on a giant onion and ate it, skin and all. It must have marked me for life for I have never ceased to love the hearty flavor of onions." James Beard
  • "I detest... anything over-cooked, over-herbed, over-sauced, over elaborate. Nothing can go very far wrong at table as long as there is honest bread, butter, olive oil, a generous spirit, lively appetites and attention to what we are eating." Sybille Bedford
  • "I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore 'way back in 1886, and they were then very far from newfangled...They contained precisely the same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispiness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact." H.L. Mencken
  • "I did toy with the idea of doing a cook-book... The recipes were to be the routine ones: how to make dry toast, instant coffee, hearts of lettuce and brownies. But as an added attraction, at no extra charge, my idea was to put a fried egg on the cover. I think a lot of people who hate literature but love fried eggs would buy it if the price was right." Groucho Marx
  • "I didn't have paprika so I used another spice.
    I didn't have potatoes so I substituted rice.
    I didn't have tomato sauce so I used tomato paste;
    (A whole can, not a half can; I don't believe in waste).
    A friend gave me this recipe and said 'you just can't beat it.'
    There must be something wrong with her, I can't even eat it!" unknown
  • "I didn't work my way to the top of the food chain to eat vegetables." seen on a bumper sticker
  • "I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens." Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • "I did not say that this meat was tough. I just said I didn't see the horse that usually stands outside." W.C. Fields
  • "I do not drink more than a sponge." François Rabelais
  • "I do not think anything serious should be done after dinner, as nothing should be before breakfast." George Saintsbury
  • "I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals." George Bernard Shaw
  • "I don't believe in putting a nuance of ginger in a dish such that you can barely taste it. If you say there is ginger in the sauce, you should really be able to taste it." Ming Tsai
  • "I don't cry over spilt milk, but a fallen scoop of ice cream is enough to ruin my whole day." Terri Guillemets
  • "I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking." Katherine Cebrian
  • "I don't go for the nouvelle approach -- serving a rabbit rump with coffee extract sauce and a slice of kiwi fruit." Jeff Smith
  • "I don't like food; I love it. If I don't love it, I don't swallow." Anton Ego
  • "I don't like food that's too carefully arranged; it makes me think that the chef is spending too much time arranging and not enough time cooking. If I wanted a picture I'd buy a painting." Andy Rooney
  • "I don't like gourmet cooking or 'this' cooking or 'that' cooking. I like good cooking." James Beard
  • "I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't because if I liked it I'd eat it, and I just hate it." Clarence Darrow
  • "I don't like to eat snails. I prefer fast food." Strange de Jim
  • "I don't like to say that my kitchen is a religious place, but I would say that if I were a voodoo priestess, I would conduct my rituals there." Pearl Bailey
  • "I don't think a really good pie can be made without a dozen or so children peeking over your shoulder as you stoop to look in at it every little while." John Gould
  • "I don't think the road to heaven is paved with bean curd." David Shaw
  • "I doubt whether the world holds for anyone a more soul-stirring surprise than the first adventure with ice cream." Heywood Broun
  • "I eat at this German-Chinese restaurant and the food is delicious. The only problem is that an hour later you're hungry for power." Dick Cavett
  • "I eat bacon for breakfast, bacon for lunch, and I drink my dinner." the movie Grumpy Old Men
  • "I eat merely to put food out of my mind." N.F. Simpson
  • "I exercise extreme self-control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast." W.C. Fields
  • "I feed him interesting food, like chutneys and sardines and jalapenos, because I'm training him to be an adventuresome eater." Michael Gross
  • "I feel a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation." Madame Benoit
  • "I feel like a midget with muddy feet has been walking over my tongue all night." W.C. Fields
  • "I feel the end approaching. Quick, bring me my dessert, coffee and liqueur." Pierette, Brillat-Savarin's great aunt
  • "I find a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation." Madame Benoit
  • "I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin." Hilaire Belloc
  • "I got food poisoning today. I don't know when I'll use it." Steven Wright
  • "I had left home (like all Jewish girls) in order to eat pork and take birth control pills. When I first shared an intimate evening with my husband I was swept away by the passion (so dormant inside myself) of a long and tortured existence. The physical cravings I had tried so hard to deny finally and ultimately sated -- but enough about the pork." Roseanne
  • "I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give." Thomas Jefferson
  • "I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion in a corner, without any more ado, or ceremony, than feed upon turkey at another man's table." Cervantes
  • "I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts." Orson Welles
  • "I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils haricots -- those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridites calling themselves human food!" George Robert Gissing
  • "I have a great diet. You're allowed to eat anything you want, but you must eat it with naked fat people." Ed Bluestone
  • "I have always maintained that there is nothing wrong with nursery food now that we are grown up and can have a glass of wine with it." Elizabeth Ray
  • "I have been assured by a very knowing acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee or ragout." Jonathan Swift
  • "I have clearly noticed that often I have one opinion when I lie down and another one when I stand up, especially when I have eaten little and when I am tired." G. C. Lichtenberg
  • "I have enjoyed great health at a great age because every day since I can remember, I have consumed a bottle of wine -- except when I have not felt well. Then I have consumed two bottles." Bishop of Seville
  • "I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale." George Farquhar
  • "I have known many meat-eaters to be far more non-violent than vegetarians." Gandhi
  • "I have lived temperately...I double the doctor's recommendation of a glass and a half of wine a day and even treble it with a friend." Thomas Jefferson
  • "I have long believed that good food, good eating is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure." Anthony Bourdain
  • "I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them." Nora Ephron
  • "I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilization. The man behind the counter, as kindly a bloke as I ever wish to meet, seemed to guess our requirements the moment we hove into view. Scarcely had our elbows touched the wood before he was leaping to and fro, bringing down a new bottle with each leap. A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I'm not saying, mind you, that he isn't right. The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down in the register, in memory of the day his father's life was saved at Wembley." P. G. Wodehouse
  • "I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon." Dorothy Sayers
  • "I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with each other." Henry David Thoreau
  • "I have no truck with lettuce, cabbage, and similar chlorophyll. Any dietitian will tell you that a running foot of apple strudel contains four times the vitamins of a bushel of beans." S.J. Perelman
  • "I have read in one of the Marseille newspapers that if certain people find aioli indigestible, it is simply because too little garlic has been included in its confection, a minimum of four cloves per person being necessary." Richard Olney
  • "I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." Winston Churchill
  • "I haven't trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during their lunch hour. I've never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for sex." Erma Bombeck
  • "I heard tell of a lady shrimp who one day scolded her daughter, saying, 'My Lord, you walk crooked! Can't you go straight?' 'And you, Mother, how do you walk?' replied the daughter. 'Can I walk straight when everyone around me walks crooked?' The daughter was right." Pellegrino Artusi "
  • "I hire tea by the tea bag." Martin Amis
  • "I just could not stand the idea of eating meat - I really do think that it has made me calmer.... People's general awareness is getting much better, even down to buying a pint of milk: the fact that the calves are actually killed so that the milk doesn't go to them but to us cannot really be right, and if you have seen a cow in a state of extreme distress because it cannot understand why its calf isn't by, it can make you think a lot." Kate Bush
  • "I just hate health food." Julia Child
  • "I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only." Henry David Thoreau
  • "I know folks all have a tizzy about it, but I like a little bourbon of an evening. It helps me sleep. I don't much care what they say about it." Lillian Carter
  • "I know how hard it is to put food on your family." George W. Bush
  • "I know my limit. I just keep passing out before I reach it. " Red Skelton
  • "I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting." Mark Twain
  • "I learned that love and cooking are the most important, the most basic, natural and essential, as well as the most entertaining pastimes in the world." Edward G. Danziger
  • "I like a Blackpool breakfast, me - 20 ciggies and a pot of tea." Lilly Savage
  • "I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work. Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm." Robert Farrar Capon
  • "I like cats, they taste just like chicken." seen on a bumper sticker
  • "I like liquor -- its taste and effects -- and that is just the reason I never drink it." General Stonewall Jackson
  • "I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food." Albert Einstein
  • "I liked the energy of cooking, the action, the camaraderie. I often compare the kitchen to sports and compare the chef to a coach. There are a lot of similarities to it." Todd English
  • "I live on good food, not fine words." Jean-Baptiste Molière
  • "I live on toasted lizards,
    Prickly pears, and parrot gizzards,
    And I'm really very fond of beetle-pie." Charles Edward Carryl
  • "I look my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses?" George Bernard Shaw
  • "I love drinking now and then. It defecates the standing pool of thought. A man perpetually in the paroxysm and fears of inebriety is like a half-drowned stupid wretch condemned to labor unceasingly in water; but a now-and-then tribute to Bacchus is like the cold bath, bracing and invigorating." Robert Burns
  • "I love fruit, when it is expensive." Sir Arthur Wing Pinero
  • "I loved my mother very much, but she was not a good cook. Most turkeys taste better the day after; my mother’s tasted better the day before. In our house Thanksgiving was a time for sorrow." Rita Rudner
  • "I never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.." Calvin Trillin
  • "I never eat sushi. I have trouble eating things that are merely unconscious." George Carlin
  • "I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that." Oscar Wilde
  • "I never met a Cab I didn't like." Graham Kerr
  • "I never see any home cooking. All I get is fancy stuff." Duke of Edinburgh
  • "I never thrust my nose into other men's porridge. It is no bread and butter of mine; every man for himself, and God for us all.” Miguel de Cervantes
  • "I never turned to drink. It seemed to turn to me." Brendan Behan
  • "I no longer prepare food or drink with more than one ingredient." Cyra McFadden
  • "I once ate a dishonest loaf. It was good, but afterward I felt so used." Thomas Pickett
  • "I personally prefer a nice frozen TV Dinner at home, mainly because it's so little trouble. All you have to do is have another drink while you're throwing it in the garbage." Jack Douglas
  • "I pray that death may strike me
    In the middle of a large meal.
    I wish to be buried under the tablecloth
    Between four large dishes.
    And I desire that this short inscription
    Should be engraved on my tombstone.
    Here lies the first poet
    Ever to die of indigestion." Marc Antoine Dèsaugiers
  • "I pray thee let me and my fellows have a hair of the dog that bit us last night." John Heywood
  • "I prefer Hostess fruit pies to pop-up toaster tarts because they don't require as much cooking." Carrie Snow
  • "I prefer milk because I am a Prohibitionist, but I do not go to it for inspiration." Mark Twain
  • "I prefer the Chinese method of eating.... You can do anything at the table except arm wrestle." Jeff Smith
  • "I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts." Graham Kerr
  • "I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time." Steven Wright
  • "I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock." Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
  • "I rose at 5 o'clock in the morning and read a chapter in Hebrew and 200 verses in Homer's Odyssey. I ate milk for breakfast, I said my prayers...I danced my dance. I read law in the morning and Italian in the afternoon. I ate tough chicken for dinner." William Byrd
  • "I sacrifice to no god save myself
    And to my belly, greatest of deities." Euripides
  • "I said to my wife, 'Where do you want to go for our anniversary?' She said, 'I want to go somewhere I've never been before.' I said, 'Try the kitchen.'" Henny Youngman
  • "I saw a cavalry captain buy vegetable soup on horseback. He carried the whole mess home in his helmet." Aristophanes
  • "I saw a sign that read 'Drink Canada Dry' and I've just started." Brendan Behan
  • "I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals." Oscar Wilde
  • "I simply cannot imagine why anyone would eat something slimy served in an ashtray." Henry Beard, on clams
  • "I sometimes feel that more lousy dishes are presented under the banner of pate than any other." Kingsley Amis
  • "I tell kids they should throw away the cereal and eat the box. At least they'd get some fiber." Richard Holstein, D.D.S.
  • "I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it." Raymond Chandler
  • "I think breakfast so pleasant because no-one is conceited before one o'clock." Sydney Smith
  • "I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?" Douglas Adams
  • "I think if you want to eat more meat you should kill it yourself and eat it raw so that you are not blinded by the hypocrisy of having it processed for you." Margi Clark
  • "I think most Scottish cuisine is based on a dare." So I Married an Axe Murderer
  • "I think somebody should come up with a way to breed a very large shrimp. That way, you could ride him, then, after you camped at night, you could eat him. How about it, science?" Jack Handey
  • "I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time." Alma Guillermoproprieto
  • "I think we all live in a world that is so fast-paced, it's threatening and absolutely saturated with change and novelty and insecurity. Therefore, the ritual of cooking and feeding my family and friends, whoever drops in, is what makes me feel that I'm in a universe that is contained." Nigella Lawson
  • "I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them a ‘wire edge’ that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said ‘no, it will come off when the enamel does’ -- which was comforting, at any rate. I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds -- but they only eat them once." Mark Twain
  • "I understand the big food companies are developing a tearless onion. I think they can do it -- after all, they've already given us tasteless bread." Robert Orben
  • "I venture to maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting, that if they could obtain a flesh diet on no other condition, they would relinquish it forever." W.E.H. Lecky
  • "I want a dish to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig's milk and served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root." Kingsley Amis
  • "I want order and taste. A well displayed meal is enhanced one hundred per cent in my eyes." Antonin Careme
  • "I was a vegetarian until I started leaning toward the sunlight." Rita Rudner
  • "I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate." Julia Child
  • "I went home and took my wife and went to my Cosen Tho. Pepys's and found them just sat down to dinner, which was very good; only the venison pasty was palpable beef, which was not handsome." Samuel Pepys
  • "I went into a McDonald's yesterday and said, 'I'd like some fries.' The girl at the counter said, 'Would you like some fries with that?'" Jay Leno
  • "I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance."Steven Wright
  • "I went to this restaurant last night that was set up like a big buffet in the shape of an Ouija board. You'd think about what kind of food you want, and the table would move across the floor to it." Steven Wright
  • "I will not eat anything that walks, runs, skips, hops or crawls. God knows that I've crawled on occasion, and I'm glad that no one ate me." Alex Poulos
  • "I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead -- not sick, not wounded -- dead." Woody Allen
  • "I will not move my army without onions!" Ulysses S. Grant
  • "I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character... like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy... The turkey... is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America." Benjamin Franklin
  • "I wish to astonish Paris with an apple." Paul Cézanne
  • "I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician." Marty Feldman
  • "I wonder if I love the communal act of eating so much because throughout my childhood, with four older brothers and a mom who worked in the restaurant business, I spent a lot of time fending for myself, eating alone -- and recognizing how eating together made all the difference." Thomas Keller
  • "I would like to find a stew that will give me heartburn immediately, instead of at three o'clock in the morning." John Barrymore
  • "I would rather live in Russia on black bread and vodka than in the United States at the best hotels. America knows nothing of food, love or art." Isadora Duncan
  • "I would say to housewives, be not daunted by one failure, nor by twenty. Resolve that you will have good bread, and never cease striving after this result till you have effected it. If persons without brains can accomplish this, why cannot you?" Marion Cabell Tyree
  • "I would stand transfixed before the windows of the confectioners' shops, fascinated by the luminous sparkle of candied fruits, the cloudy lustre of jellies, the kaleidoscope inflorescence of acidulated fruit drops -- red, green, orange, violet: I coveted the colours themselves as much as the pleasure they promised me." Simone de Beauvoir
  • "I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty." Sylvia Plath
  • "I'll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal. " Martha Harrison
  • "I’ll dispose of my teeth as I see fit, and after they’ve gone, I’ll get along. I started off living on gruel, and by God, I can always go back to it again." S.J. Perelman
  • "I'm a man. Men cook outside. Women make the three-bean salad. That's the way it is and always has been, since the first settlers of Levittown. That outdoor grilling is a manly pursuit has long been beyond question. If this wasn't firmly understood, you'd never get grown men to put on those aprons with pictures of dancing wienies and things on the front..." William Geist
  • "I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table." Rodney Dangerfield
  • "I'm awfully sorry for people who are taken in by all of today's dietary mumbo jumbo. They are not getting any enjoyment out of their food." Julia Child
  • "I'm fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors." Janet Flanner
  • "I'm Frank Thompson, all the way from 'down east.' I've been through the mill, ground, and bolted, and come out a regular-built down-east johnny-cake, when it's hot, damned good; but when it's cold, damned sour and indigestible; --and you'll find me so." Richard Henry Dana
  • "I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes. Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid. Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it." Alfred Hitchcock
  • "I'm not so think as you drunk I am." John Squire
  • "I've found without question that the best way to lead others to a more plant-based diet is by example - to lead with your fork, not your mouth." Bernie Wilke
  • "I've got brown sandwiches and green sandwiches - it's either very new cheese or very old meat." Oscar Madison, in The Odd Couple
  • "I've long said that if I were about to be executed and were given a choice of my last meal, it would be bacon and eggs. There are few sights that appeal to me more than the streaks of lean and fat in a good side of bacon, or the lovely round of pinkish meat framed in delicate white fat that is Canadian bacon. Nothing is quite as intoxicating as the smell of bacon frying in the morning, save perhaps the smell of coffee brewing." James Beard
  • "I've made it a rule never to drink by daylight and never to refuse a drink after dark." H.L. Mencken
  • "Ice cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal." Voltaire
  • "If a body could just find oot the exac' proper proportion and quantity that ought to be drunk every day, and keep to that, I verily trow that he might leeve for ever, without dying at a', and that doctors and kirkyards would og oot o' fashion." James Hogg
  • "If a man were to lock in his house a hoard of gold, a few figs, and two or three men, he would find out how much better figs are than gold." Ananias
  • "If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?" Author Unknown
  • "If all the world were apple pie,
    And all the seas were ink,
    And all the trees were bread and cheese,
    What would we have for drink?" Mother Goose
  • "If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing … The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record." Hilaire Belloc
  • "If any man gives you a wine you can't bear, don't say it is beastly... But don't say you like it. You are endangering your soul and the use of wine as well... Seek out some other wine good to your taste." Hillaire Belloc
  • "If any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure; if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep; if his fine spirits have become temporarily dulled; if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow, and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand; if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought: if he is any of these poor creatures, we say, let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate... and marvels will be performed." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "If any one element of French cooking can be called important, basic and essential, that element is soup." Louis Diat
  • "If God had intended us to follow recipes, he wouldn't have given us grandmothers." Linda Henley
  • "If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles." Colette
  • "If I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably --why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work--for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?" Herman Melville
  • "If I hear you've gone to Dinty Moore's for that nasty corned beef and cabbage, Jiggs, I'll brain you!" Maggie
  • "If I were a headmaster, I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them." Roald Dahl
  • "If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of the television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners." Johnny Carson
  • "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." J.R.R. Tolkien
  • "If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate." Diogenes the Cynic
  • "If pale beans bubble for you in a red earthenware pot, you can often decline the dinners of sumptuous hosts." Martial
  • "If penicillin can cure those that are ill, Spanish sherry can bring the dead back to life." Sir Alexander Fleming
  • "If people take the trouble to cook, you should take the trouble to eat." Robert Morley
  • "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." Paul McCartney
  • "If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony." Fernand Point
  • "If the elbow had been placed closer to the hand, the forearm would have been too short to bring the glass to the mouth; and if it had been closer to the shoulder, the forearm would have been so long that it would have carried the glass beyond the mouth." Benjamin Franklin
  • "If the English can survive their food, they can survive anything." George Bernard Shaw
  • "If the melting pot exists, the cheeseburger may well be its most palpable product; to take a bite of it is to take a bite of history..." Elizabeth Rozin
  • "If the skill of the artist had failed, if he had served some ill-prepared dish, the cook was put in irons on the spot, or else was led to the triclinium (dining-room) by two henchmen and severely flogged in the presence of the guests." C. Dezobry
  • "If the soup had been as warm as the wine, if the wine had been as old as the turkey, if the turkey had had a breast like the maid, it would have been a swell dinner." Duncan Hines
  • "If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys." Orson Welles
  • "If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food." Lin Yutang
  • "If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; if this is tea, please bring me some coffee." Abraham Lincoln
  • "If thou rise with an Appetite, thou art sure never to sit down without one." William Penn
  • "If we breathe the scent of goodly grass, the fragrance of spices, the aroma of good fruits, we pronounce a blessing over the pleasure." Shmuel Y. Agnon
  • "If we weren't meant to eat animals, why are they made of meat?" seen on a bumper sticker
  • "If we're not willing to settle for junk living, we certainly shouldn't settle for junk food." Sally Edwards
  • "If you're given champagne at lunch, there's a catch somewhere." Lord Lyons
  • "If you're going to America, bring your own food." Fran Lebowitz
  • "If you are cold, tea will warm you--if you are too heated, it will cool you--if you are depressed, it will cheer you--if you are excited, it will calm you." William Gladstone
  • "If you are what you eat and you don't know what you're eating, do you know who you are?" Claude Fischler
  • "If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner." George Eliot
  • "If you do not believe that a man will commit murder for one can of tomatoes, then you have never been hungry." Robert A. Heinlein
  • "If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes." Eleanor Clark
  • "If you drink it straight down, you can feel it going into each individual intestine." Richard Burton (on raicilla)
  • "If you eat less and live longer, over time you'll have eaten just as much." Michael Feldman
  • "If you find an Australian indoors, it's a fair bet that he will have a glass in his hand." Jonathan Aitken
  • "If you go back far enough in cookery, you realize that you are not an inventor, only a recreator." Michel Guerard
  • "If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information -- French fried potatoes are out." Jean Kerr
  • "If you hear an onion ring, answer it." Anonymous
  • "If you knew how meat was made, you'd probably lose your lunch." k.d. lang
  • "If you want to know the people of a nation, I am sure you can judge a great deal more about them from their cooking and eating traditions than you can from the words and actions of their public officials." Pyotr Kropoptkin
  • "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Carl Sagan
  • "If your doctor does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat of a particular dish, do not worry; I will find you another who will not agree with him." Michel de Montaigne
  • "If you're going to America, bring your own food." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Il n'y a pas de bonne cuisine sans bon bouillon; la cuisine francaise, la premiere de toutes les cuisine doit sa superiorite a l'excellence du bouillon francais." Alexander Dumas
  • "In a restaurant, choose a table near a waiter." Unknown
  • "In America, even your menus have the gift of language.... "The Chef's own Vienna Roast. A hearty, rich meat loaf, gently seasoned to perfection and served in a creamy nest of mashed farm potatoes and strictly fresh garden vegetables." Of course, what you get is cole slaw and a slab of meat, but that doesn't matter because the menu has already started your juices going. Oh, those menus. In America, they are poetry." Laurie Lee
  • "In America we eat, collectively, with a glum urge for food to fill us. We are ignorant of flavour. We are as a nation taste-blind." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added." H.L. Mencken
  • "In case my life should end with the cannibals, I hope they will write on my tombstone, 'We have eaten Dr. Schweitzer. He was good to the end.'" Albert Schweitzer
  • "In cooking, as in all the arts, simplicity is the sign of perfection." Count Curnonsky
  • "In England there are sixty different religions and one sauce." Voltaire
  • "In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport." Julia Child
  • "In general, Mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires." Benjamin Franklin
  • "In Mexico we have a word for sushi -- bait." Jose Simon
  • "In medieval times the habit arose of expressing a man's wealth, no longer in terms of the amount of land in his estate, but of the amount of pepper in his pantry. One way of saying that a man was poor was to say that he lacked pepper. The wealthy lacked pepper. The wealthy kept large stores of pepper in their houses, and let it be known that it was there: it was a guarantee of solvency." Waverly Root
  • "In moments of considerable strain I tend to take to bread-and-butter pudding. There is something about the blandness of soggy bread, the crispness of the golden outer crust and the unadulterated pleasure of a lightly-set custard that makes the world seem a better placer to live." Clement Freud
  • "In most households a cup of coffee is considered the one thing needful at the breakfast hour. But how often this exhilarating beverage, that ‘comforteth the brain and heateth and helpeth digestion’ is made muddy and ill-flavoured! ... You may roast the berries ‘to the queen's taste,’ and grind them fresh every morning, and yet, if the golden liquid be not prepared in the most immaculate of coffee-pots, with each return of morning, a new disappointment awaits you." Janet McKenzie Hill
  • "In my experience, clever food is not appreciated at Christmas. It makes the little ones cry and the old ones nervous." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • "In nothing more is the English genius for domesticity more notably declared than in the institution of this festival -- almost one may call it -- of afternoon tea. The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose." George Gissing
  • "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." Carl Sagan
  • "In Paris today millions of pounds of bread are sold daily, made during the previous night by those strange, half-naked beings one glimpses through cellar windows, whose wild-seeming cries floating out of those depths always makes a painful impression. In the morning, one sees these pale men, still white with flour, carrying a loaf under one arm, going off to rest and gather new strength to renew their hard and useful labor when night comes again. I have always highly esteemed the brave and humble workers who labor all night to produce those soft but crusty loaves that look more like cake than bread." Alexandre Dumas
  • "In Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken salad sandwich, you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean: Eel with big abscess." Dave Barry
  • "In taking soup, it is necessary to avoid lifting too much in the spoon, or filling the mouth so full as almost to stop the breath." St. John the Baptist de la Salle
  • "In the Barbecue is any four footed animal -- be it mouse or mastodon -- whose dressed carcass is roasted whole... at its best it is a fat steer, and must be eaten within an hour of when it is cooked. For if ever the sun rises upon Barbecue, its flavor vanishes like Cinderella's silks, and it becomes cold baked beef -- staler in the chill dawn than illicit love." William Allen White
  • "In the childhood memories of every good cook, there's a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot and a mom." Barbara Costikyan
  • "In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "In the last analysis, a pickle is a cucumber with experience." Irena Chalmers
  • "In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiner's Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island Duck, he might have written a masterpiece." A.J. Liebling
  • "In the nineteenth century, it was traditional to serve three courses of asparagus--thought to be a powerful aphrodisiac -- to a French groom on the night before the wedding. The modern French gentleman has discarded the noble asparagus for the more romantic passion prompter -- Champagne." Sharon Tyler Herbst
  • "In the orchestra of a great kitchen, the sauce chef is a soloist." Fernand Point
  • "In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death - even vegetarians." Mr. Spock
  • "In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds...for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.” John Kenneth Galbraith
  • "In the vegetable world, there is nothing so innocent, so confiding in its expression, as the small green face of the freshly-shelled spring pea." William Wallace Irwin
  • "In Vino Veritas (In wine there is truth)." Pliny the Elder
  • "In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria." David Auerbach
  • "INDIGESTION, n. A disease which the patient and his friends frequently mistake for deep religious conviction and concern for the salvation of mankind. As the simple Red Man of the western wild put it, with, it must be confessed, a certain force: ‘Plenty well, no pray; big bellyache, heap God.’" Ambrose Bierce
  • "Ingredients to a cook is like dress and jewelry to a woman. A beautiful woman can do nothing with shabby dresses no matter how skilled she is in making herself up." Yuan Xical
  • "Insufficient pizza consumption is associated with irritability and slack-jawedness. Don’t let this happen to you." Matthew Amster-Burton
  • "Isn't there any other part of the matzo you can eat?" Marilyn Monroe, on matzo balls
  • "It doesn't matter who you are, or what you've done, or think you can do. There's a confrontation with destiny awaiting you. Somewhere, there is a chile you cannot eat." Daniel Pinkwater
  • "It's a native domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption." James Thurber
  • "It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician." Meryl Streep
  • "It's difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato." Lewis Grizzard
  • "It's food too fine for angels, yet come, take and eat thy fill!" Edward Taylor
  • "It's hard to imagine civilization without onions." Julia Child
  • "It's OK to be fat. So you're fat. Just be fat and shut up about it." Roseanne Arnold
  • "It's probably illegal to make soups, stews and casseroles without plenty of onions." Maggie Waldron
  • "It's so beautifully arranged on the plate -- you know someone's fingers have been all over it." Julia Child
  • "It freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating." Brillat-Savarin
  • "It gives men courage and ambition and the nerve for anything. It has the colour of gold, is clear as a glass and shines after dark as if the sunshine were still in it." O. Henry (on whiskey)
  • "It has been said of garlic that everyone knows its odor save he who has eaten it, and who wonders why everyone flies at his approach." George Ellwanger
  • "It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes." Douglas Adams
  • "It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him." Miguel de Cervantes
  • "It is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees." Oscar Wilde
  • "It is agreed by most men, that the Eele is a most daintie fish; the Romans have esteemed her the Helena of their feasts, and some The Queen of pleasure." Izaak Walton
  • "It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not." Robert Hughes
  • "It is certain that the custom of flesh eating among the ancients began with the direst necessity, with the choice between that or death by starvation." Eugene Christian
  • "It is contrary to the will of God to eat delicate food hastily." Chang Chao
  • "It is difficult to make something good out of second class materials, but it is quite easy to spoil the first class ones." Charles Gundel
  • "It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the amount of money that goes out of the country as a consequence. Everybody is using coffee; this must be prevented. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were both his ancestors and officers. Many battles have been fought and won by soldiers nourished on beer, and the King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be relied upon to endure hardships in case of another war." Frederick the Great of Prussia
  • "It is illegal to give someone food in which has been found a dead mouse or weasel." Ancient Irish law
  • "It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick." Annie Dillard
  • "It is not elegant to gnaw Indian corn. The kernels should be scored with a knife, scraped off into the plate, and then eaten with a fork. Ladies should be particularly careful how they manage so ticklish a dainty, lest the exhibition rub off a little desirable romance." Charles Day
  • "It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless." John Kenneth Galbraith
  • "It is not often in life we have the privilege of handling a masterpiece of ingenuity. But we do it without thinking when we cook one of nature"s most brilliant creations -- the unassuming but extraordinary egg.” Anne Gardiner and Sue Wilson
  • "It is not 'only' food, I said heatedly. "There's meaning hidden underneath each dish." Ruth Reichl
  • "It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him." Robertson Davies
  • "It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust." Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • "It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance..." Virginia Woolf
  • "It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever... Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls." Robert Farrar Capon
  • "It is proved by experience that, beyond five or six dozen, oysters certainly cease to be enjoyable." Grimod de la Reyniere
  • "It is said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite... fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything for money, but not the kernel." Arne Garborg
  • "It is so beautifully arranged on the plate, you know someone has had their hands all over it." Julia Child
  • "It is the destiny of mint to be crushed." Waverley Root
  • "It is the sauce that distinguishes a good chef. The saucier is a soloist in the orchestra of a great kitchen." Ferdinand Point
  • "It is the sign of a dull mind to dwell upon the cares of the body, to prolong exercise, eating and drinking, and other bodily functions. These things are best done by the way; all your attention must be given to the mind." Epictetus
  • "It is well known among physicians that the best of the nourishing foods is the one that the Moslem religion forbids, i.e., Wine. It contains much good and light nourishment. It is rapidly digested and helps to digest other foods." Maimonides
  • "It is, of course, entirely possible to cook without using wine. It is also possible to wear suits and dresses made out of gunny sacks, but who wants to?" Morrison Wood
  • "It is, of course, entirely possible to cook without using wine. It is also possible to wear suits and dresses made out of gunny sacks, but who wants to?" Morrison Wood
  • "It isn't so much what's on the table that matters, as what's on the chairs." W.S. Gilbert
  • "It may not be possible to get rare roast beef -- but if you're willing to settle for well done, ask them to hold the sweetened library paste that passes for gravy." Marian Burros
  • "It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it." Henry James
  • "It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity." Kingsley Amis (describing a pate)
  • "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
  • "It takes a lot of dough to make the upper crust" Alfred E. Newman
  • "It takes great passion and great energy to do anything creative, especially in the theater. You have to care so much that you can't sleep, you can't eat, you can't talk to people. It's just got to be right. You can't do it without that passion." Agnes George DeMille
  • "It [Thanksgiving] was founded by the Puritans to give thanks for bein’ preserved from the Indians, an’ we keep it to give thanks we are preserved from the Puritans." Finley Peter Dunne
  • "It was dramatic to watch [my grandmother] decapitate [a turkey] with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with "gourmet" status." Russell Baker
  • "It was for bringing the cook tulip-roots instead of onions." Lewis Carroll on why the queen commanded "Off with his head!"
  • "It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought." P.G. Wodehouse
  • "It was quite a challenge to make people eat crab ice cream." Heston Blumenthal
  • "It would be nice if the Food and Drug Administration stopped issuing warnings about toxic substances and just gave me the names of one or two things still safe to eat." Robert Fuoss
  • "It's difficult to see that people are starving in this country because food isn't available." Ronald Reagan
  • "It’s easier to change a man’s religion than his diet." Margaret Mead
  • "It's important to watch what you eat. Otherwise, how are you going to get it into your mouth?" Matt Diamond
  • "It's nice to eat a good hunk of beef but you want a light dessert, too." Arthur Fiedler
  • "I'm a light eater. When it gets light, I start eating." Tommy John
  • "I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should hanging fom a charm bracelet." Erma Bombeck
  • "I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks." Totie Fields
  • "I've got only one other speed, and it's slower." sign in diner
  • "I've liked lots of people 'til I went on a picnic jaunt with them." Bess Truman
  • "I've long said that if I were about to be executed and were given a choice of my last meal, it would be bacon and eggs. There are few sights that appeal to me more than the streaks of lean and fat in a good side of bacon, or the lovely round of pinkish meat framed in delicate white fat that is Canadian bacon. Nothing is quite as intoxicating as the smell of bacon frying in the morning, save perhaps the smell of coffee brewing." James Beard
  • "I've stopped drinking, but only while I'm asleep." George Best
  • "Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning." Igor Stravinsky
  • "Keen appetite
    And quick digestion wait on you and yours." John Dryden
  • "Ketchup left overnight on dinner plates has a longer half-life than radioactive waste." Wes Smith
  • "Labor-intensive handmade food is under siege in contemporary culture, but it’s still thriving in Brooklyn, and the infusion of hipsters has reinvigorated it. They recognize the value in old style, third-generation bakers and sausage makers because they’re searching for things that are real. In part thanks to them, Brooklyn’s still full of honest food." Ed Levine
  • "Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Las Vegas is Everyman's cut-rate Babylon. Not far away there is, or was, a roadside lunch counter and over it a sign proclaiming in three words that a Roman emperor's orgy is now a democratic institution... 'Topless Pizza Lunch.'" Alistair Cooke
  • "Laughter is brightest, in the place where the food is." or "Laughter is brightest where food is best." Irish proverb
  • "Lentils are friendly — the Miss Congeniality of the bean world." Laurie Colwin
  • "Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with breadcrumbs, fried hencod's roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of scented urine." James Joyce
  • "Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
    and, half-suspected, animate the whole." Lady Holland
  • "Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which the worst by far is rum. Nevertheless, we have improved man's lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon and the Martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much?" Bernard De Voto
  • "Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda-water the day after." Lord Byron
  • "Les écrivans-cuisiniers sont aussi nécessaires que les autres litteratures; il vous fait connaitre la theorie du plus ancien des arts." Charles Gerard
  • "Lets get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." Robert Benchley
  • "Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, and so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it." Charles Dudley Warner
  • "Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon." Doug Larson
  • "Life goes faster on protein." Martin H. Fischer
  • "Life is a combination of magic and pasta. " Federico Fellini
  • "Life is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have a half a one for breakfast." Douglas Adams
  • "Life is like an onion.
    You peel it off one layer at a time;
    And sometimes you weep." Carl Sandburg
  • "Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it." James Gibbons Huneker
  • "Life is so brief that we should not glance either too far backwards or forwards... therefore study how to fix our happiness in our glass and in our plate." Grimod de la Reyniere
  • "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom." Storm Jameson
  • "Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first." Ernestine Ulmer
  • "Liqueurs were not lacking; but the coffee especially deserves mention. It was as clear as crystal, aromatic and wonderfully hot; but, above all, it was not handed around in those wretched vessels called cups on the left banks of the Seine, but in beautiful and capacious bowls, into which the thick lips of the reverend fathers plunged, engulfing the refreshing beverage with a noise that would have done honor to sperm-whales before a storm." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of each. Grow green with the spring, yellow and ripe with autumn." Henry David Thoreau
  • "Long ago, it was said that if you drink the right amount of Scotch each day, you will find the secret of Eternal Youth. People have been in pursuit ever since." Ian Henderson
  • "Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." Proverbs 23:29-32
  • "Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates." Fernando Pessoa
  • "Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing." James Thurber
  • "Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man is starving." O. Henry
  • "Love and eggs are best when they are fresh." Russian Proverb
  • "Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea." Henry Fielding
  • "Lucy took a single plain donut from the bag and held it for me to take a bite. Tender and light and still warm from the frying. Not too sugary." Robert Crais
  • "Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half." Charles De Montesquieu
  • "Luncheon: as much food as one's hand can hold." Samuel Johnson
  • "Lyon is full of temperamental gourmets, eternally engaged in a never-ending search for that imaginary, perfect, unknown little back-street bistro, where one can dine in the style of Louis XIV for the price of a pack of peanuts." Roy Andries de Groot
  • "Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life: let swear eternal friendship." Sydney Smith
  • "Madam, there's no such thing as a tough child -- if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender." WC Fields
  • "Making coffee has become the great compromise of the decade. It's the only thing 'real' men do that doesn't seem to threaten their masculinity. To women, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting the spring back into the toilet-tissue holder or taking a chicken out of the freezer to thaw." Erma Bombeck
  • "Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them." Adlai Stevenson, II
  • "Man does not live by bread alone, even presliced bread." D.W. Brogan
  • "Man is a carnivorous production,
    And must have meals, at least one meal a day;
    He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction,
    But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey;
    Although his anatomical construction
    Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way,
    Your laboring people think beyond all question,
    Beef, veal, and mutton better for digestion." Lord Byron
  • "Man is born to eat." Craig Claiborne
  • "Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them." Samuel Butler
  • "Manhattan is a narrow island off the coast of New Jersey devoted to the pursuit of lunch." Raymond Sokolov
  • "MANNA, n. A food miraculously given to the Israelites in the wilderness. When it was no longer supplied to them they settled down and tilled the soil, fertilizing it, as a rule, with the bodies of the original occupants." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Many are the ways and many the recipes for dressing hares; but this is the best of all, to place before a hungry set of guests a slice of roasted meat fresh from the spit, hot, season'd only with plain, simple salt....All other ways are quite superfluous, such as when cooks pour a lot of sticky, clammy sauce upon it." Archestratus
  • "Many so-called aphrodisiac recipes are basically wholesome ingredients prepared in a tasty way. The receptivity to romance probably comes from the general sense of relaxation and well-being good food induces." Harry E. Wedeck
  • "Marmalade in the morning has the same effect on taste buds that a cold shower has on the body." Jeanine Larmoth
  • "Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food." Frank A. Clark
  • "Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Members who never sit idly at the Long Table or loiter fecklessly at the Bar are missing the best features the Club has to offer... savoring the pleasures of the commercially worthless discourse that is there in such plentiful supply." Century Club of New York
  • "Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them." P. G. Wodehouse
  • "Men that can have communication in nothing else can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine." Thomas Carlyle
  • "Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer." Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • "Mincing your words makes it easier if you have to eat them later." Franklin P. Jones
  • "Mine eyes smell onions: I shall weep anon." Shakespeare
  • "Miss Child is never bashful with butter." Phil Donahue
  • "Moderately drunk, coffee removes vapours from the brain, occasioned by fumes of wine, or other strong liquors; eases pains in the head, prevents sour belchings, and provokes appetite." England's Happiness Improved (1699)
  • "Moderation. Small helpings. Sample a little bit of everything. These are the secret to happiness and good health." Julia Child
  • "Money brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends." Henrik Ibsen
  • "'Monsieur,' Madame d'Arestel, Superior of the convent of the Visitation at Belley, once said to me more than fifty years ago, ‘whenever you want to have a really good cup of chocolate, make it the day before, in a porcelain coffeepot, and let it set. The night's rest will concentrate it and give it a velvety quality which will make it better. Our good God cannot possibly take offense at this little refinement, since he himself is everything that is most perfect.'" Brillat-Savarin
  • "More people will die from hit-or-miss eating than from hit-and-run driving." Duncan Hines
  • “More than any other in Western Europe, Britain remains a country where a traveler ... has to think twice before indulging in the ordinary food of ordinary people.” Joseph Lelyveld
  • "Most importantly, what you get from a greasy spoon is a certain kind of smell that has been almost legislated out of existence. It is cigaretty, certainly, and it also has the catch-throat quality of smoking fat. It is a warm, companionable fug that rises to meet you as you step through the door on a late autumn day and it is how public places used to smell in my childhood in the 1970s. It is real, it is human, and it beats anything I know." Kathryn Hughes
  • "Most of the food allergies die under garlic and onion." Martin H. Fischer
  • "Most vigtaryans I iver see looked enough like their food to be classed as cannybals." Finley Peter Dunne
  • "Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession." W.H. Auden
  • "Music with dinner is an insult to both the cook and the violinist." G.K. Chesterton
  • "Mustard's no good without roast beef." Chico Marx
  • "My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate -- that's my philosophy." Thornton Wilder
  • "My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people." Orson Welles
  • "My family dumplings are sleek and seductive, yet stout and masculine. They taste of meat, yet of flour. They are wet, yet they are dry. They have weight, but they are light. Airy, yet substantial. Earth, air, fire, water; velvet and elastic! Meat, wheat and magic! They are our family glory!" Robert Tristram Coffin
  • "My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe's humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout parched meal pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries." Journals of Lewis and Clark, Thursday, June 13, 1805
  • "My favorite animal is steak." Fran Lebowitz
  • "My favorite sandwich is peanut butter, baloney, cheddar cheese, lettuce, and mayonnaise on toasted bread with catsup on the side." Hubert H. Humphrey
  • "My favorite word is 'pumpkin.' You can't take it seriously. But you can't ignore it, either. It takes ahold of your head and that's it. You are a pumpkin. Or you are not. I am." Harrison Salisbury
  • "My good health is due to a soup made of white doves. It is simply wonderful as a tonic." Mme. Chiang Kai-shek
  • "My grandfather had a wonderful funeral... On the buffet table there was a replica of the deceased in potato salad." Woody Allen
  • "My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. She drinks right out of the bottle." Henny Youngman
  • "My idea of heaven is eating pates de foie gras to the sound of trumpets." Sydney Smith
  • "My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies." W.C. Fields
  • "My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future." Pearl Bailey
  • "My manner of living is plain and I do not mean to be put out of it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready." George Washington
  • "My mother didn't really cook. But she did make key lime pie, until the day the top of the evaporated milk container accidentally ended up in the pie and she decided cooking took too much concentration." William Norwich
  • "My mother was a good recreational cook, but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you." Nora Ephron
  • "My perspective of veganism was most affected by learning that the veal calf is a by-product of dairying, and that in essence there is a slice of veal in every glass of what I had thought was an innocuous white liquid - milk." Rynn Berry
  • "My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them." Winston Churchill
  • "My situation is a solemn one. Life is offered to me on condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarfs in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures." George Bernard Shaw
  • "My son would walk to the refrigerator-freezer and fling both doors open and stand there until the hairs in his nose iced up. After surveying $200 worth of food in varying shapes and forms, he would declare loudly, 'There's nothing to eat!'" Erma Bombeck
  • "My soul is dark with stormy riot,
    Directly traceable to diet." Samuel Hoffenstein
  • "My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M's and a chocolate cake. I feel better already." Dave Barry
  • "My tongue is smiling." Abigail Trillin
  • "My wife and I tried to breakfast together, but we had to stop or our marriage would have been wrecked." Winston Churchill
  • "My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop." Winston Churchill
  • "My wife is on a diet. Coconuts and bananas. She hasn't lost any weight, but she can sure climb a tree." Henny Youngman
  • "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate." Horace Fletcher
  • "NECTAR, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Never commit yourself to a cheese with having first examined it." T.S. Eliot
  • "Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake in the afternoon." Jilly Cooper
  • "Never eat Chinese food in Oklahoma." Bryan Miller
  • "Never eat in a place called 'Mom's'." Nelson Algren
  • "Never eat more than you can lift." Miss Piggy
  • "Never hesitate to take the last piece of bread or the last cake; there are probably more." Hill's Manual of Social and Business Forms: Etiquette of the Table
  • "Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one’s life… but 1932 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers and 1937 the Kit Kat – these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the memory of every child in the country." Roald Dahl
  • "Never trust the food in a restaurant on top of the tallest building in town that spends a lot of time folding napkins." Andy Rooney
  • "Never work before breakfast; if you have to work before breakfast, eat your breakfast first." Josh Billings
  • "New York is the greatest city in the world for lunch... That's the gregarious time. And when that first martini hits the liver like a silver bullet, there is a sigh of contentment that can be heard in Dubuque." William Emerson Jr.
  • "New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world, are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite&emdash;the taxi driver." Alan Brien
  • "New York's own islands of watercress and Postum in seas of gastronomical exotica." Julie Baumgold (on little old lady restaurants)
  • "News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself." Rose McCaulay
  • "Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili." Harry James
  • "No cook who has attained mastery over her craft ever apologizes for the presence of garlic in her productions." Ruth Gottfried
  • "No dish changes quite so much from season to season as soup. Summer's soups come chilled, in pastel colors strewn with herbs. If hot they are sheer insubstantial broths afloat with seafood. In winter they turn steaming and thick to serve with slabs of rustic, crusty bread." Florence Fabricant
  • "No, I don't take soup. You can't build a meal on a lake." Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl)
  • "No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut." Channing Pollock
  • "No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention." Christopher Morley
  • "No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." Rube Goldberg
  • "No matter what kind of diet you are on, you can usually eat as much as you want of anything you don't like." Walter Slezak
  • "No mean woman can cook well. It calls for a generous spirit, a light hand, and a large heart." Eden Phillpotts
  • "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." Laurie Colwin
  • "No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers." Horace
  • "No purist talk here of letting the flavors speak for themselves, the English let them sing in concert." Juliet Annan
  • "No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use." Emily Post
  • "Nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it, tastes even better with capers not in it." Nora Ephron
  • "Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime." Edward Abbey
  • "Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, well, so is the ballet."Julia Child
  • "Nothing is more useful than wine for strengthening the body and also more detrimental to our pleasure if moderation be lacking." Pliny the Elder
  • "Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own." Robert Louis Stevenson
  • "Nothing more than a French meat loaf that's had a couple of cocktails." Carol Cutler, on pâté
  • "Nothing rekindles my spirits, gives comfort to my heart and mind, more than a visit to Mississippi... and to be regaled as I often have been, with a platter of fried chicken, field peas, collard greens, fresh corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes with French dressing... and to top it all off with a wedge of freshly baked pecan pie." Craig Claiborne
  • "Nothing spoils lunch any quicker than a rogue meatball rampaging through your spaghetti." Jim Davis
  • "Nothing stimulates the practiced cook's imagination like an egg." Irma Rombauer
  • "Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love." Charlie Brown,"Peanuts"
  • "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." Albert Einstein
  • "Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity." Voltaire
  • "Nouvelle Cuisine, roughly translated, means: I can't believe I paid ninety-six dollars and I'm still hungry." Mike Kalin
  • "Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead." Carson McCullers
  • "Nutrition makes me puke." Jimmy Piersall
  • "Oats: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." Samuel Johnson
  • "Of soup and love, the first is best." Spanish Proverb
  • "Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic - that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. And that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed." Evelyn Waugh
  • "Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Often, admiring a chef and then getting to know him is like loving goose liver and then meeting the goose." George Lang
  • "Oh, that curdles my soul." Lynne Bien (on putting mace and nutmeg in apple pie)
  • "Oh, that miracle clove! Not only does garlic taste good, it cures baldness and tennis elbow, too." Laurie Burrows Grad
  • "Oh thrice and four times happy... those who plant cabbages." François Rabelais
  • "Old people shouldn't eat health food. They need all the preservatives they can get." Robert Orben
  • "Older women are like aging strudels&emdash;the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling has come at last into its own." Robert Farrar Capon
  • "Omit and substitute! That's how recipes should be written. Please don't ever get so hung up on published recipes that you forget that you can omit and substitute." Jeff Smith
  • "On Digestion and Indigestion: The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like and do what you'd rather not." Mark Twain
  • “On one occasion some one put a very little wine into a [glass], and said that it was sixteen years old. 'It is very small for its age,' said Gnathaena.” Athenaeus
  • "On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it." Gustave Flaubert
  • "On Thanksgiving, you realize you’re living in a modern world. Millions of turkeys baste themselves in millions of ovens that clean themselves." George Carlin
  • "On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners." George Mikes
  • "Once in a young lifetime one should be allowed to have as much sweetness as one could possibly want and hold." Judith Olney
  • "Once... in the wilds of Afganistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days." WC Fields
  • "One cannot have too large a party. " Jane Austen
  • "One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle." Henry David Thoreau
  • "One man's poison ivy is another man's spinach." George Ade
  • "One must always welcome guests sincerely, with a certain effusion of the heart, for when they come to your table they must already be happy with you." Baron Brisse
  • "One never knows where the most ambitious eaters among us live, but I am confident we will identify incredible eating talent during the 2007 circuit." Richard Shea
  • "One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts." Samuel Johnson
  • "One of the earth's monstrosities." Pliny (on the artichoke)
  • "One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment." Thomas Keller
  • "One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating." Luciano Pavarotti
  • "One of these nuts is a meal for a man, both meat and drink." Marco Polo, on coconuts
  • "One more drink and I'll be under the host." Dorothy Parker
  • "One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts." Samuel Johnson
  • "One of the glories of New York is its ethnic food, and only McDonald's and Burger King equalize us all." John Corry
  • "One of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread." M. F. K. Fisher
  • "One person cooking at home cannot pay attention to too many things. If a woman makes three dishes, she will get nervous on the first, the second will suffer and the third will be a disaster." Rene Veaux
  • "One should never refuse an invitation to lunch or dinner, for one never knows what one may have to eat the next day. " Edouard de Pomiane
  • "One sits the whole day at the desk and appetite is standing next to me. 'Away with you,' I say. But Comrade Appetite does not budge from the spot." Leonid I. Brezhnev
  • "Onions can make even heirs and widows weep." Benjamin Franklin
  • "Onion skins very thin,
    Mild winter coming in.
    Onion skins very tough,
    Coming winter very rough." Old English rhyme
  • "Onions can make even heirs and widows weep." Benjamin Franklin
  • "Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast." Oscar Wilde
  • "Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups -- alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and fat." Alex Levine
  • "Only when a chef changed the way you saw the world, through cooking, did food truly become art, and that was rare indeed." Michael Ruhlman
  • "Our minds are like our stomachs; they are whetted by the change of their food, and variety supplies both with fresh appetites." Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
  • "Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats." J. B. Priestley
  • "Out of snow, you can't make cheesecake." Jewish Proverb
  • "OVEREAT, v. To dine." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Oyster: A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails. The shells are something given to the poor." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Palpating, crackling, splitting on the grill, Boudins whistle louder than blackbirds in April." Paul Harel
  • "Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside." Mark Twain
  • "Peanut butter -- the pâté of childhood." Florence Fabricant
  • "Penicillin cures, but wine makes people happy." Sir Alexander Fleming
  • "People are cooking less but obsessing about it more." D. Poynter
  • "People are getting really baroque with their perversions." Alison Cook (on fajitas, with meat marinated in Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper)
  • "People are getting tired of going out to expensive restaurants and spending lots of money for seven pea pods and a two-inch steak." Lynne Bien
  • "People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes, try to understand that there must be a reason for this." Fran Lebowitz
  • "People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times." Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • "Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue." Plato
  • "Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!" Iris Murdoch
  • "Physically he was the connoisseur's connoisseur. He was a giant panda, Santa Claus and the Jolly Green Giant rolled into one. On him, a lean and slender physique would have looked like very bad casting." Craig Claiborne (on James Beard)
  • "PIE, n. An advance agent of the reaper whose name is Indigestion." Ambrose Bierce
  • "PIG, n. An animal (Porcus omnivorus) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Pigs may not be as cuddly as kittens or puppies, but they suffer just as much." James Cromwell
  • "Plain cooking cannot be trusted to plain cooks." Countess Morphy
  • "Plant a radish, get a radish, never any doubt. That's why I love vegetables, you know what they're about!" Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt
  • "Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus." Peter Ustinov
  • "Please understand the reason why Chinese vegetables taste so good. It is simple. The Chinese do not cook them, they just threaten them!" Jeff Smith
  • "Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent. ‘When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,’ said Piglet at last, ‘what’s the first thing you say to yourself?’ ‘What’s for breakfast?’ said Pooh. ‘What do you say, Piglet?’ ‘I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?’ said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s the same thing,’ he said." A.A. Milne
  • "Pork - no animal is more used for nourishment and none more indispensable in the kitchen; employed either fresh or salt, all is useful, even to its bristles and its blood; it is the superfluous riches of the farmer, and helps to pay the rent of the cottager." Alexis Soyer
  • "Potatoes are to food what sensible shoes are to fashion." Linda Wells
  • "PORTUGUESE, n.pl. A species of geese indigenous to Portugal. They are mostly without feathers and imperfectly edible, even when stuffed with garlic." Ambrose Bierce
  • "POTABLE, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine. Upon nothing has so great and diligent ingenuity been brought to bear in all ages and in all countries, except the most uncivilized, as upon the invention of substitutes for water. To hold that this general aversion to that liquid has no basis in the preservative instinct of the race is to be unscientific -- and without science we are as the snakes and toads." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for the painter." Brillat-Savarin
  • "Pounding fragrant things -- particularly garlic, basil, parsley -- is a tremendous antidote to depression. But it applies also to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chili pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one's being -- from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated. Virgil's appetite was probably improved equally by pounding garlic as by eating it." Patience Gray
  • "Powdermilk biscuits: Heavens, they're tasty and expeditious! They're made from whole wheat, to give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. Powder Milk biscuits: Buy them ready-made in the big blue box with the picture of the biscuit on the front, or in the brown bag with the dark stains that indicate freshness." Garrison Keillor
  • "Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food,
    For wisdom and guidance, for all these are good,
    but don't forget the potatoes." John Tyler Pettee
  • "Pray for peace and grace and spiritual food. For wisdom and guidance, for all these are good. But don’t forget the potatoes." John Tyler Petee
  • "Pray how does your asparagus perform?" John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail
  • "Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent." Epictetus
  • "Probably no strychnine has sent as many husbands into their graves as mealtime scolding has, and nothing has driven more men into the arms of other women as the sound of a shrill whine at the table." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery." Fannie Farmer
  • "Protect your bagels, put lox on them." sign at Bagel Connection, New Haven, CT
  • "Proust had his madeleines; I am devastated by the scent of yeast bread rising." Bert Greene
  • "Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before." Luigi Barzini
  • "Quail is the only dish I know that comes with built-in toothpicks." Unknown
  • "RAREBIT n. A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless, who point out that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may be solemnly explained that the comestible known as toad-in-a-hole is really not a toad, and that riz-de-veau à la financière is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she banker." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Reasons For Drinking:
    If all be true that I do think,
    There are five reasons we should drink:
    Good wine -- a friend --or being dry --
    Or lest we should be by and by --
    Or any other reason why." Henry Aldrich
  • "Recipe: A series of step-by-step instructions for preparing ingredients you forgot to buy, in utensils you don't own, to make a dish the dog wouldn't eat." Author Unknown
  • "Recipe? Recipe? We don' need no stinkin' recipe." Eli Wallach
  • "Recognize meat for what is really is: the antibiotic and pesticide laden corpse of a tortured animal." Ingrid Newkirk (President of PETA)
  • "Red meat is NOT bad for you. Now, blue-green meat, THAT'S bad for you!" Tommy Smothers
  • "Red onions are especially divine. I hold a slice up to the sunlight pouring in through the kitchen window, and it glows like a fine piece of antique glass. Cool watery-white with layers delicately edged with imperial purple...strong, humble, peaceful...with that fiery nub of spring green in the center..." Mary Hayes Grieco
  • "Remember the days when you let your child have some chocolate if he finished his cereal? Now, chocolate is one of the cereals." Robert Orben
  • "Remember the good old days when a liquid-protein diet was chicken soup." Gil Stern
  • "Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water." W.C. Fields
  • "Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate." Sandra Boynton
  • "Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana...The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are." Matt Lauer
  • "Revenge is a dish best served cold." Dorothy Parker
  • "Reward is a happy customer — and an empty plate." Jacques Torres
  • "Rhubarb: essence of stomach ache." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Rice is a beautiful food. It is beautiful when it grows, precision rows of sparkling green stalks shooting up to reach the hot summer sun. It is beautiful when harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled on diked, patchwork paddies. It is beautiful when, once threshed, it enters granary bins like a (flood) of tiny seed-pearls. It is beautiful when cooked by a practiced hand, pure white and sweetly fragrant." Shizuo Tsuji
  • "Rice is born in water and must die in wine." Italian Proverb
  • "Rosie's is as simple as a hubcap and as unpretentious as its own rice pudding." Francis X. Clines (on a diner)
  • "RUM, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Said Aristotle unto Plato,
    'Have another sweet potato?'
    Said Plato unto Aristotle,
    'Thank you, I prefer the bottle.'" Owen Wister
  • "Sacred cows make the best hamburger." Mark Twain
  • "Salad freshens without enfeebling and fortifies without irritating." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "Salmon are like men: too soft a life is not good for them." James de Coquet
  • "Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea." Pythagoras
  • "Salt is the policeman of taste: It keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker." Malcolm De Chezal
  • "Salt is white and pure -- there is something holy in salt." Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • "SATIETY, n. The feeling that one has for the plate after he has eaten its contents, madam." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Sauce, n. The one infallible sign of civilizations and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted, a vice is renounced and forgiven." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Sauces in cookery are like the first rudiments of grammar -- the foundation of all languages." Alexis Soyer
  • "Scotch Whisky is about the only thing left that is guaranteed to bring comfort to mankind." Lord Boothbury
  • "Scotch Whisky is invaluable in repairing the exhausted forces of nature." W.B. Gloag
  • "Seating themselves on the greensward, they eat while the corks fly and there is talk, laughter and merriment, and perfect freedom, for the universe is their drawing room and the sun their lamp. Besides, they have appetite, Nature's special gift, which lends to such a meal a vivacity unknown indoors, however beautiful the surroundings." Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "Seeing is deceiving. It's eating that's believing." James Thurber
  • "Serenely full the epicure may say, Fate cannot harm me. I have dined today." Sydney Smith
  • "Serve the dinner backward, do anything -- but for goodness sake, do something weird." Elsa Maxwell
  • "Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn." Garrison Keillor
  • "Shape is a good part of the fig's delight." Jane Grigson
  • "Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly." M. F. K. Fisher
  • "She ate so many clams that her stomach rose and fell with the tide." Louis Kronenberger
  • "She knows no difference 'twixt head and privities who devours immense oysters at midnight." Juvenal
  • "She set about preparing her supper. It would have to be one of those classically simple meals, the sort that French peasants are said to eat and that enlightened English people sometimes enjoy rather self-consciously – a crusty French loaf, cheese, and lettuce and tomatoes from the garden. Of course there should have been wine and a lovingly prepared dressing of oil and vinegar, but Dulcie drank orange squash and ate mayonnaise that came from a bottle." Barbara Pym
  • "She was so wild that when she made French toast her tongue got caught in the toaster." Rodney Dangerfield
  • "Shiatsu, deep-tissue or maybe even Rolfing: Which manner of pummeling becomes a cephalopod most?" Frank Bruni (on Octopus)
  • "Shipping is a terrible thing to do to vegetables. They probably get jet-lagged, just like people." Elizabeth Berry
  • "Show me a nation whose national beverage is beer, and I'll show you an advanced toilet technology." Paul Hawkins
  • "Simmer til you can't stand it any more, then take it off the fire and dive in." Ernest Matthew Mickler
  • "Sir To. Dost tho think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
    Clo. Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too!" William Shakespeare
  • "Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink." P.G. Wodehouse
  • "So few people eat okra (more radishes are grown in this country) that it never even makes it onto the lists of Top 10 hated foods." Julia Reed
  • "So long as people don't know how to eat they will not have good cooks." Escoffier
  • "So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.." Franz Kafka
  • "Some breakfast food manufacturer hit upon the simple notion of emptying out the leavings of carthorse nose bags, adding a few other things like unconsumed portions of chicken layer's mash, and the sweepings of racing stables, packing the mixture in little bags and selling them in health food shops." Frank Muir
  • "Some fishes become extinct, but Herrings go on forever. Herrings spawn at all times and places and nothing will induce them to change their ways. They have no fish control. Herrings congregate in schools, where they learn nothing at all. They move in vast numbers in May and October. Herrings subsist upon Copepods and Copepods subsist upon Diatoms and Diatoms just float around and reproduce. Young Herrings or Sperling or Whitebait are rather cute. They have serrated abdomens. The skull of the Common or Coney Island Herring is triangular, but he would be just the same anyway. (The nervous system of the Herring is fairly simple. When the Herring runs into something the stimulus is flashed to the forebrain, with or without results.)" Will Cuppy
  • "Some guy invented Vitamin A out of a carrot. I'll bet he can't invent a good meal out of one." Will Rogers
  • "Some people have a foolish way of not minding, or of pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously and very carefully; for I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else,." Samuel Johnson
  • "Some people kiss as if they were eating watermelon." Saadat Hasan Manto
  • "Some people's food always tastes better than others, even if they are cooking the same dish at the same dinner...because one person has more life in them -- more fire, more vitality, more guts -- than others. A person without these things can never make food taste right, no matter what materials you give them...they have nothing in themselves to give. You have got to throw feeling into cooking." Rosa Lewis
  • "Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences." James Thurber
  • "Someone is putting brandy in your bonbons, Grand Marnier in your breakfast jam, Kahlua in your ice cream, Scotch in your mustard and Wild Turkey in your cake." Marian Burros
  • "Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple-pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks — a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in this city, except in genuine Dutch families." Washington Irving
  • "Souffle is more important than you think. If men ate soufflé before meetings, life could be much different." Jacques Baeyens
  • "Soul food is our personal passport to the past. It is much more about heritage than it is about hominy." Sarah Ban Breathnach
  • "Soup and fish explain half the emotions of life." Sidney Smith
  • "Soup should be seen and not heard." Anonymous
  • "Sparagrass eaten to Excess sharpen the Humours and heat a little; ...They cause a filthy and disagreeable Smell in the Urine, as every Body knows." Louis Lémery
  • "Spinach is the broom of the stomach." French Proverb
  • "Square meals, not adventurous ones, are what you should seek." Bryan Miller
  • "Speaking of food, English cuisine has received a lot of unfair criticism over the years, but the truth is that it can be a very pleasant surprise to the connoisseur of severely overcooked livestock organs served in lukewarm puddles of congealed grease. England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria." Dave Barry
  • "Spending on feasting and wine is better than hoarding our substance; that which we give makes us richer, that which is hoarded is lost" Shota Rustaveli
  • "Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive." Wallace Irwin
  • "Stock to a cook is voice to a singer." Anonymous
  • "Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody." Samuel Pepys
  • "Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands- and then eat just one of the pieces." Judith Viorst
  • "Stressed spelled backwards is desserts. Coincidence? I think not!" Author Unknown
  • "Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice." Barbra Streisand
  • "Summer cooking implies a sense of immediacy, a capacity to capture the fleeting moment." Elizabeth David
  • "Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge." John Lyly
  • "TABLE D'HOTE, n. A caterer's thrifty concession to the universal passion for irresponsibility." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Take advantage of the gracious condescension of the elegant calf's kidney, multiply its metamorphoses: you can without giving it any offence, call it the chameleon of cuisine." Des Essarts
  • "Take care to chop the onion fine." Laura Esquivel
  • "Take equal parts of brandy and blackberry juice; add to every gallon one pound of loaf-sugar. This is excellent for bowel complaints." E. F. Haskell
  • "Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home-made bread -- there may be." David Grayson
  • "Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine -- how good how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry." John Keats
  • "Tea at college was served on long tables with an urn at the end of each. Long baguettes of bread, three to a table, were set out with meagre portions of butter and jam; the china was coarse to withstand the schoolboy-clutch and the tea strong. At the Hôtel de Paris I was astonished at the fragility of the cups, the silver teapot, the little triangular savoury sandwiches, the éclairs stuffed with cream." Graham Greene
  • "Tea that helps our head and heart
    Tea medicates most every part
    Tea rejuvenates the very old
    Tea warms the piss of those who're cold." J. Jonker
  • "Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don't have to teach him anything." Lawrence Downes
  • "TEETOTALER, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Ten cooks' shops! ...and all within three minutes' driving! one would think that all the cooks in the world ...had said -- Come, let us all go live at Paris: the French love good eating -- they are all gourmands -- we shall rank high." Laurence Sterne
  • "Texas does not, like any other region, simply have indigenous dishes. It proclaims them. It congratulates you, on your arrival, at having escaped from the slop pails of the other 49 states." Alistair Cooke
  • "Thanksgiving Day -- Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji." Mark Twain
  • "Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence." Erma Bombeck
  • "Thanksgiving is America's national chow-down feast, the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty (in France, by contrast, there are three such days: Hier, Aujourd'hui and Demain). [i.e Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow]." Michael Dresser
  • "That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted." Reported last words of Lou Costello
  • "That's something I've noticed about food: whenever there's a crisis if you can get people to eating normally things get better." Madeleine L'Engle
  • "The $100-plus dinner in New York is a major speculative undertaking akin to going after sunken treasure -- the cost of the expedition is going to be steep [and] you'll come out of it enriched or just soaked." Ross K. Baker
  • "The act of putting into your mouth what the earth has grown is perhaps your most direct interaction with the earth." Frances Moore Lappe
  • "The age of your children is a key factor in how quickly you are served in a restaurant. We once had a waiter in Canada who said, 'Could I get you your check?' and we answered, 'How about the menu first?'" Erma Bombeck
  • "The ambition of every good cook must be to make something very good with the fewest possible ingredients." Urbain Dubois
  • "The American bartender of the 'Gay Nineties' was an institution. His fame spread to the four corners of the globe, and visitors to our shores from the continent bowed before his skill in concocting tempting mixtures of 'liquid lightening'. He was—and still is—in a class by himself. We may go to Europe for our chefs, but Europe comes to us for its bartenders." W. C. Whitfield
  • "The American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day." Rudyard Kipling
  • "The Americans are a funny lot; they drink whiskey to keep them warm; then they put some ice in it to make it cool; they put some sugar in it to make it sweet, and then they put a slice of lemon in it to make it sour. Then they say 'here's to you' and drink it themselves." B.N. Chakravarty
  • "The Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known. As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, and indigestible, while it is taken in the least artificial forms that cookery will allow. The predominance of grease in the American kitchen, coupled with the habits of hearty eating, and the constant expectoration, are the causes of the diseases of the stomach which are so common in America." James Fenimore Cooper
  • "The army from Asia introduced a foreign luxury to Rome; it was then the meals began to require more dishes and more expenditure... the cook, who had up to that time been employed as a slave of low price, become dear: what had been nothing but a métier was elevated to an art." Livy
  • "The art of cooking as practised by Englishmen does not extend much beyond roast beef and plum pudding." Peter Kalm
  • "The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure." Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
  • "The artichoke is, after all, an extremely civilized thistle with a very gastronomic beginning." Andre Launay
  • "The appetites of the stomach and the palate, far from diminishing as men grow older, go on increasing." Cicero
  • "The bagel, an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis." Beatrice & Ira Freeman
  • "The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of 'real food for real people' you'd better live real close to a real good hospital." Neal Barnard, M.D.
  • "The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious." Tom Robbins
  • "The belly rules the mind." Spanish Proverb
  • "The benevolence of wrapping the partridge in a vine leaf brings out its quality, just as the barrel of Diogenes brought forth the qualities of the great thinker." Des Essarts
  • "The best number for a dinner-party is two: myself and a damn good head waiter." Nubar Gulbenkian
  • "The best sauce in the world is hunger." Cervantes
  • "The best thing about liver is how virtuous it makes you feel after you've eaten some." Bruce Jay Friedman
  • "The best way to eat the elephant standing in your path is to cut it up into little pieces." African Proverb
  • "The breakfast slimes, angel food cake, doughnuts and coffee, white bread and gravy cannot build an enduring nation." Martin H. Fischer
  • "The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy or disaster. The pulse stops apparently, and nothing can be done, and no move made, until ‘a nice cup of tea’ is quickly made. There is no question that it brings solace and does steady the mind. What a pity all countries are not so tea-conscious. World-peace conferences would run more smoothly if ‘a nice cup of tea’, or indeed, a samovar were available at the proper time." Marlene Dietrich
  • "The camembert with its venison scent defeats the Marolles and Limbourg dull smells; It spreads its exhalation, smothering the other scents under its surprising breath abundance." Emile Zola
  • "The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood." Benjamin C. Bradlee
  • "The codfish is a staple food
    For which I'm seldom in the mood.
    This fish is such an utter loss
    That people eat it with egg sauce." Ogden Nash
  • "The cocktail party... is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring." Brooks Atkinson
  • "The cold truth is that family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters." M.F.K. Fisher
  • "The confection made of Cacao called Chocolate or Chocoletto which may be had in diverse places in London, at reasonable rates, is of wonderful efficacy for the procreation of children: for it not only vehemently incites to Venus, but causes conception in women . . . and besides that it preserves health, for it makes such as take it often to become fat and corpulent, fair and amiable." William Coles
  • "The cook was a good cook as cooks go; and as cooks go she went." H.H. Munro (Saki)
  • "The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution." Paul Cezanne
  • "The difference between a gourmet and a gourmand we take to be this: a gourmet is he who selects, for his nice and learned delectation, the most choice delicacies, prepared in the most scientific manner; whereas the gourmand bears a closer analogy to that class of great eaters ill-naturedly (we dare say) denominated, or classed with, aldermen." Abraham Hayward
  • "The difference between a rather average cook and a chef is that the chef is never really satisfied with what he is serving. He is constantly trying to achieve the high expectation he has set for himself. He is seeking to develop his palate and to enhance the skills of his palate through cooking, travel, and just being open. By keeping yourself open to what's new or who's doing something a little bit better, you strive for perfection. I'm always looking to improve on what I do." Bradley Ogden
  • "The difference between roast beef and pea soup is...anyone can roast beef." Tom Snyder
  • "The disappearance of hot hors-d'oeuvre was the result of the excessive development of women's skirts." Baron Leon Brisse
  • "The disobedient fowl obeys in a pot of soup." Nigerian Proverb
  • "The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet." Miss Manners (Judith Martin)
  • "The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "The drink is slipping its little hand into yours." J. Bryan III
  • "The duty of a good Cuisinier is to transmit to the next generation everything he has learned and experienced." Fernand Point
  • "The egg creams of Avenue A in New York and the root beer float are among the high points of American gastronomic inventiveness." Mark Kurlansky
  • "The emotional content of garlic almost equals its culinary value." Arthur E. Grosser
  • "The English have only three sauces - a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever." Guy de Maupassant
  • "The English will agree with me that there are plenty of good things for the table in America; but the old proverb says: 'God sends meat and the devil sends cooks.'" Captain Frederick Marryat
  • "The fact is I simply adore fish,
    But I don't know a perch from a pike;
    And I can't tell a cray from a crawfish
    They look and they taste so alike." William Cole
  • "The fact is that it takes more than ingredients and technique to cook a good meal. A good cook puts something of himself into the preparation -- he cooks with enjoyment, anticipation, spontaneity, and he is willing to experiment." Pearl Bailey
  • "The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne." Samuel Johnson
  • "The feminist movement has helped open minds and kitchens to the notion that men can be at home on the range." Rene Veaux
  • "The first of all considerations is that our meals shall be fun as well as fuel." Andre Simon
  • "The first printed mention of bagels... is to be found in the Community Regulations of Kracow, Poland, for the year 1610 which stated that bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth." Leo Rosten
  • "The first time I ate organic whole-grain bread I swear it tasted like roofing material." Robin Williams
  • "The first zucchini I ever saw I killed it with a hoe." John Gould
  • "The food here is so tasteless you could eat a meal of it and belch and it wouldn't remind you of anything." Redd Foxx
  • "The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: 'I bet that if we called this something like `escargot,' tourists would eat it.' Then they had hearty laugh, because 'escargot' is the French word for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm.'" Dave Barry
  • "The French are sawed-off sissies who eat snails and slugs and cheese that smells like people's feet. Utter cowards who force their own children to drink wine, they gibber like baboons even when you try to speak to them in their own wimpy language." P. J. O'Rourke
  • "The French fried potato has become an inescapable horror in almost every public eating place in the country. ‘French fries,’ say the menus, but they are not French fries any longer. They are a furry-textured substance with the taste of plastic wood." Russell Baker
  • "The French peasant cuisine is at the basis of the culinary art. By this I mean it iscomposed of honest elements that la grand cuisine only embellishes." Alexandre Dumaine
  • "The fricassee with dumplings is made by a Mrs. Miller whose husband has left her four times on account of her disposition and returned four times on account of her cooking..." Rex Stout
  • "The friendly cow, all red and white,
    I love with all my heart;
    She gives me cream with all her might,
    To eat with apple tart." Robert Louis Stevenson
  • "The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among civilized people, and warms the heart." Samuel Chamberlain
  • "The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines. One tells them from the vinegar by the label." Mark Twain
  • "The glances over cocktails
    That seem to be so sweet
    Don't seem quite so amorous
    Over Shredded Wheat" Frank Muir
  • "The goose we retained until this morning, when there were signs that, in spite of the slight frost, it would be well that it should be eaten without delay. Its finder has carried it off therefore to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • "The great dish of New Orleans, and which it claims having the honor of invented, is the GUMBO. There is no dish which at the same time so tickles the palate, satisfies the appetite, furnished the body with nutriment sufficient to carry on the physical requirements, and costs so little as a Creole Gumbo. It is a dinner in itself, being soup, piece de résistance, entremet and vegetable in one. Healthy, and not heating to the stomach and easy of digestion, it should grace every table." William H. Coleman
  • "The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. 'I am not alone and unacknowledged.' They nod to me and I to them." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "The height of luxury was reached in the winter afternoons … lying in a tin bath in front of a coal fire, drinking tea, and eating well-buttered crumpets is an experience few can have today." J.C. Masterman
  • "The Highlanders regale themselves with whisky. They find it an excellent preservation against the winter cold. It is given with great success to the infants in the confluent smallpox." Tobias Smollett
  • "The highway is replete with culinary land mines disguised as quaint local restaurants that carry such reassuring names as Millie's, Pop's and Capt'n Dick's." Bryan Miller
  • "The hippopotamus is a vegetarian and looks like a wall. Lions who eat only red meat are sleek and slim. Are nutritionists on the wrong track?" Erma Bombeck
  • "The history of government regulation of food safety is one of government watchdogs chasing the horse after it's out of the barn." David A. Kessler, M.D.
  • "The host must always have his eye on his guests’ plates and glasses, to make sure they have all they require; …A host whose guest has had to ask for anything is a dishonoured man." Baron Brisse
  • "The hostess must be like the duck -- calm and unruffled on the surface, and paddling like hell underneath." Anonymous
  • "The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk." Michael Klaper, M.D.
  • "The Infusion of a China plant sweetened with the pith of an Indian Cane." Joseph Addison, On Tea
  • "The inventor of soda crackers has a place in hell." Martin H. Fischer
  • "The jelly -- the jam and the marmalade,
    And the cherry-and quince-'preserves' she made!
    And the sweet-sour pickles of peach and pear,
    With cinnamon in 'em, and all things rare!
    And the more we ate was the more to spare,
    Out to old Aunt Mary's! Ah!" James Whitcomb Riley
  • "The kind of crabbing my wife likes to do is to return from an afternoon's swim or sunbathing session, open the refrigerator door, and find a generous plate of crab cakes all ready to cook." Euell Gibbons
  • "The kitchen is the great laboratory of he household, and much of the 'weal and woe' as far as regards bodily health, depends on the nature of the preparations concocted within its walls." Isabella Beeton
  • "The kitchen, reasonably enough, was the scene of my first gastronomic adventure. I was on all fours. I crawled into the vegetable bin, settled on a giant onion and ate it, skin and all. It must have marked me for life, for I have never ceased to love the hearty flavor of raw onions." James Beard
  • "The last taste of sweets is sweetest last." Shakespeare
  • "The local wine, a dinner at your friends' house, and music performed by amateurs are three things to be equally dreaded." Grimod de la Reyniere
  • "The longer I work in nutrition, the more convinced I become that for the healthy person all foods should be delicious." Adele Davis
  • "The majority of those who put together collections of verses or epigrams resemble those who eat cherries or oysters: they begin by choosing the best and end by eating everything." Nicolas Chamfort
  • "The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization." Fernand Braudel
  • "The millionaire too often lacks acquaintances of congenial tastes, and is compelled to fall back on gorgeous profusion to bestow lustre on his table. On the other hand, a person of more slender means is liable to fall into the error of supposing that his friends do not care to dine at his table, unless he imitates the surroundings of the wealthier classes. It occurs to comparatively few persons that the chief charm of a dinner-party lies in ease of manner on the part of the host and hostess, together with all the arrangements of the entertainment being in accordance with the income and the natural mode of living of the entertainer." Cassells Household Guide
  • "The more you eat, the less flavor; the less you eat, the more flavor." Chinese Proverb
  • "The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  • "The most basic rule of survival, in any situation, is ‘never look like food’." Park Ranger, Great Smoky Mountains National Park
  • "The most dangerous food is wedding cake." James Thurber
  • "The most expensive bottle of wine is way out of most people's reach; the most expensive bottle of balsamic vinegar costs more than a thousand dollars. But the most expensive chocolate bar costs only $9." Clay Gordon
  • "The most learned men have been questioned as to the nature of this tuber, and after two thousand years of argument and discussion their answer is the same as it was on the first day: we do not know. The truffles themselves have been interrogated, and have answered simply: eat us and praise the Lord." Alexandre Dumas
  • "The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found." Calvin Trillin
  • "The most usual, common, and cheap sort of Food all China abounds in, and which all in that Empire eat, from the Emperor to the meanest Chinese; the Emperor and great Men as a Dainty, the common sort as necessary sustenance. It is called Teu Fu, that is Paste of Kidney Beans. I did not see how they made it. They drew the Milk out of the Kidney Beans, and turning it, make great Cakes of it like Cheeses, as big as a large Sieve, and five or six fingers thick. All the Mass is as white as the very Snow, to look to nothing can be finer... Alone, it is insipid, but very good dress'd as I say and excellent fry'd in Butter." Friar Domingo Navarrete
  • "The most learned men have been questioned as to the nature of this tuber, and after two thousand years of argument and discussion their answer is the same as it was on the first day: we do not know. The truffles themselves have been interrogated, and have answered simply: eat us and praise the Lord." Alexandre Dumas
  • "The natural term of an apple-pie is but twelve hours. It reaches its highest state about one hour after it comes from the oven, and just before its natural heat has quite departed. But every hour afterward is a declension. And after it is one day old, it is thence-forward but the ghastly corpse of apple-pie." Henry Ward Beecher
  • "The nectarine and curious peach
    Into my hands themselves do reach;
    Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
    Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass." Andrew Marvell
  • "The olive tree is surely the richest gift of Heaven." Thomas Jefferson
  • "The onion and its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables and is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can be said to have a soul." Charles Dudley Warner
  • "The onion is the truffle of the poor." Robert J. Courtine
  • "The onion tribe is prophylactic and highly invigorating, and even more necessary to cookery than parsley itself." George Ellwanger
  • "The only cooks in the civilized world are French cooks…. Other nations understand food in general; the French alone understand cooking, because all their qualities -- promptitude, decision, tact -- are employed in the art. No foreigner can make a good white sauce." Louis Victor Nestor Roqueplan
  • "The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream." Wallace Stevens
  • "The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn’t have eyeballs or fins." Dave Barry
  • "The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a what-the-hell attitude." Julia Child
  • "The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey...and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it." A.A. Milne (as Winnie the Pooh)
  • "The only time to eat diet food is while you are waiting for the steak to cook." Julia Child
  • "The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." Mark Twain
  • "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." G.K. Chesterton
  • "The powder is mixed with water and tastes exactly like powder mixed with water." Art Buchwald (on liquid diets)
  • "The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living..." Dione Lucas
  • "The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite." A. J. Liebling
  • "The proof of the pudding is in the eating. By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece." Miguel de Cervantes
  • "The qualities of an exceptional cook are akin to those of a successful tightrope walker: an abiding passion for the task, courage to go out on a limb and an impeccable sense of balance." Bryan Miller
  • "The quality of food is in inverse proportion to a dining room's altitude, especially atop bank and hotel buildings (airplanes are an extreme example)." Bryan Miller
  • "The rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted... your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on." Bernard De Voto (in praise of martinis)
  • "The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can't eat it." Victor (Trader Vic) Bergeron
  • "The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume; but a good stomach excels them all." William Penn
  • "The refectory is a cenacle in which the taking of food is transfigured almost into a sacrament." Monica Baldwin
  • "The rich would have to eat money if the poor did not provide food." Assyrian Proverb
  • "The right food always comes at the right time. Reliance on out-of-season foods makes the gastronomic year an endlessly boring repetition." Roy Andries de Groot
  • "The roe of the Russian sturgeon has probably been present at more important international affairs than have all the Russian dignitaries of history combined. This seemingly simple article of diet has taken its place in the world along with pearls, sables, old silver, and Cellini cups." James Beard
  • "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today." Lewis Carroll
  • "The same intelligence is required to marshal an army in battle and to order a good dinner. The first must be as formidable as possible, the second as pleasant as possible, to the participants." Plutarch
  • "The savor of the water mint rejoiceth the heart of men." John Gerard
  • "The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio -- rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord -- a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up." Aldus Huxley
  • "The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you're off it." Jackie Gleason
  • "The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age." Lucille Ball
  • "The secret to good cooking resides in the cook's ability to say 'the hell with the basic recipe' and improvise freely from it. If you haven't got this kind of moxie, you might as well hang up your apron." James Alan McPherson
  • "The so-called nouvelle cuisine usually means not enough on your plate and too much on your bill." Paul Bocuse
  • "The soft extractive note of an aged cork being withdrawn has the true sound of a man opening his heart." William Samuel Benwell
  • "The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand." Margaret Halsey
  • “The Spanish Wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.” D.H. Lawrence
  • "The spirit cannot endure the body when overfed, but, if underfed, the body cannot endure the spirit." St. Frances de Sales
  • "The story of barbecue is the story of America: Settlers arrive on great unspoiled continent, discover wondrous riches, set them on fire and eat them." Vince Staten
  • "The strawberry grows underneath the nettle;
    And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
    Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality." Shakespeare; King Henry V. Act I. Scene 1
  • "The sweetest honey
    Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
    And in the taste confounds the appetite." William Shakespeare
  • "The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him." James Joyce
  • "The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me." George Bernard Shaw, turning down an invitation to a vegetarian dinner
  • "The time will come when this luscious golden tomato, rich in nutrition, a delight to the eye, a joy to the palate whether fried, baked, broiled or even eaten raw will form the foundation of a great garden industry." Col. Robert Johnson
  • "The toaster is part of a system and only has significance relative to the wrapped, pan-made, thin-crusted bread that can be used in it … Ultimately, the toaster is an apology for the quality of our bread... the toaster represents a heroic attempt to redeem our packaged bread… Every piece of toast is a tragedy. " Arthur Berge
  • "the tomato offers
    its gift
    of fiery color
    and cool completeness." Pablo Neruda
  • "The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again." George Miller
  • "The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn." Norman Douglas
  • "The true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection." Ludwig Bemelmans
  • "The truffle is not a positive aphrodisiac, but it can upon occasion make women tenderer and men more apt to love." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "The turnip is a capricious vegetable, which seems reluctant to show itself at its best." Waverley Root
  • "The waste of many good materials, the vexation that frequently attends such mismanagements, and the curses not unfrequently bestowed on cooks with the usual reflection, that whereas God sends good meat, the devil sends cooks." E. Smith
  • "The way I feel about it is: Beat me or feed me, but don't tease me. It's toy food; who needs it? Serve it to toy people." Jeff Smith
  • "The way you cut your meat reflects the way you live." Confucius
  • "The white Aylesbury duck is, and deservedly, a universal favourite. Its snowy plumage and comfortable comportment make it a credit to the poultry-yard, while its broad and deep breast, and its ample back, convey the assurance that your satisfaction will not cease at its death." Isabella Beeton
  • "The whole of nature, as has been said, is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and in the passive." William Ralph Inge
  • "The wine had such ill effects on Noah's health that it was all he could do to live 950 years. Just nineteen years short of Methuselah. Show me a total abstainer that ever lived that long." Will Rogers
  • "The woman just ahead of you at the supermarket checkout has all the delectable groceries you didn't even know they carried." Mignon McLaughlin
  • "The world is made of sugar and dirt." Alfred Dublin
  • "The world is progressing and resources are becoming more abundant. I'd rather go into a grocery store today than a king's banquet a hundred years ago." Bill Gates
  • "The worst drug of today is not smack or pot -- it's refined sugar." George Hamilton
  • "The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober." William Butler Yeats
  • "Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are." Maurice Sendak
  • "There are few decisive acts in cookery, each step contributes to the end result." Claude Peyrot
  • "There are few hours in life more than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." Henry James
  • "There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett
  • "There are many miracles in the world to be celebrated and, for me, garlic is the most deserving." Leo Buscaglia
  • "There are no standards of taste in wine... Each man's own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard." Mark Twain
  • "There are only ten minutes in the life of a pear when it is perfect to eat." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "There are only two choices on the menu: take it or leave it." seen on a bumper sticker
  • "There are only two questions to ask about food. Is it good? And is it authentic? We are open [to] new ideas, but not if it means destroying our history. And food is history." Giuliano Bugialli
  • "There are probably few people in civilized life, who were the question put to them directly - would not say, that they consider bread one of the most, if not the most important article of diet which enters into the food of man. And yet there is, in reality, almost a total and universal carelessness about the character of bread. Thousands in civic life will, for years, and perhaps as long as they live, eat the most miserable trash that can be imagined, in the form of bread, and never seem to think that they can possibly have anything better, nor even that it is an evil to eat such stuff as they do." Sylvester Graham
  • "There are times when born hollandaise heads, as well as nouveaux turbot freaks and recherche escargotphiles alike crave the saignet abundance of a New York steak." Gael Greene
  • "There are two Italies.... The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other is the most degraded, disgusting, and odious. What do you think? Young women of rank actually eat -- you will never guess what -- garlick! Our poor friend Lord Byron is quite corrupted by living among these people, and in fact, is going on in a way not worthy of him." Percy Bysshe Shelley"There has always been a food processor in the kitchen. But once upon a time she was usually called the missus or Mom." Sue Berkman
  • "There are two types of onions, the big white Spanish and the little red Italian. The Spanish has more food value and is therefore chosen to make soup for huntsmen and drunkards, two classes of people who require fast recuperation." Alexandre Dumas
  • "There are two types of people who eat truffles: those who think truffles are good because they are dear and those who know they are dear because they are good." J.L. Vaudoyer
  • "There has always been a food processor in the kitchen. But once upon a time she was usually called the missus or Mom." Sue Berkman
  • "There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?" M.F.K. Fisher
  • "There is a lot more juice in grapefruit than meets the eye." Author Unknown
  • "There is a vast difference between the savage and the civilised man, but it is never apparent to their wives until after breakfast." Helen Rowland
  • "There is in every cook's opinion
    No savoury dish without an onion:
    But lest your kissing should be spoiled
    The onion must be thoroughly boiled." Sydney Smith
  • "There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle." G.K. Chesterton
  • "There is no cure 'gainst age but it." Alexander Pope (on coffee)
  • "There is no doubt at all that the moderate use of wine while eating is the pleasantest and probably the most effective tranquilizer known to medical man." Dr. Russel V. Lee
  • "There is no love sincerer than the love of food." George Bernard Shaw
  • "There is no sight on earth more appealing than the sight of a woman making dinner for someone she loves." Thomas Wolfe
  • "There is no substitute for mother's milk." Martin H. Fischer
  • "There is no such thing as a little garlic." A. Baer
  • "There is no way to understand the public reaction to the sight of a Freak smashing a coconut with a hammer on the hood of a white Cadillac in a Safeway parking lot unless you actually do it, and I tell you it's tense." Hunter S. Thompson
  • "There is nothing better on a cold wintry day than a properly made pot pie." Craig Claiborne
  • "There is nothing as American as a French chef from the Bronx." Susan Heller & David W. Anderson Dunlap
  • "There is nothing like a morning funeral for sharpening the appetite for lunch." Arthur Marshall
  • "There is nothing like a plate or a bowl of hot soup, its wisp of aromatic steam making the nostrils quiver with anticipation, to dispel the depressing effects of a grueling day at the office or the shop, rain or snow in the streets, or bad news in the papers." Louis P. De Gouy
  • "There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn; a tavern chair is the throne of human felicity." Samuel Johnson
  • "There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't and that's a wife who can't cook and will." Robert Frost
  • "There is something in the red of a raspberry pie that looks as good to a man as the red in a sheep looks to a wolf." Evelyn Waugh
  • "There must be some good in the cocktail party to account for its immense vogue among otherwise sane people." E.W. Howe
  • "There was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine ... 'This is my frugal breakfast ... Give me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret.'" Charles Dickens
  • "These things are just plain annoying. After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual 'food' out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps. Have the shrimp cocktail instead." Miss Piggy
  • "They bake them in the oven, they boil them with meat, they make them fifty different ways. Blessed be he that invented the pudding -- to come in pudding time is to come to the most lucky moment in the world." M. François Misson
  • "They put arsenic in his meat
    And stared aghast to watch him eat;
    They poured strychnine in his cup
    And shook to see him drink it up." A.E. Housman
  • "They served haggis at the last dinner I attended. I didn't know whether to kick it or eat it. Having eaten it, I wished I'd have kicked it." Stuart Turner
  • "Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night." William Blake
  • "Think of me tonite
    For that which you savor
    Did it give you something real,
    or could you taste the pain of my death in its flavor?" Wayne K. Tolson
  • "Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay." George Bernard Shaw
  • "This has got to be the most expensive food ever laminated." Marian Burros, referring to a meal at Barry Wine's Quilted Giraffe restaurant
  • “This root, no matter how much you prepare it, is tasteless and floury. It cannot pass for an agreeable food, but it supplies a food sufficiently abundant and sufficiently healthy for men who ask only to sustain themselves. The potato is criticised with reason for being windy, but what matters windiness for the vigorous organisims of peasants and labourers?” Denis Diderot (on the potato)
  • "This Satan's drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall cheat Satan by baptizing it." Anonymous, 16th century (on coffee)
  • "This special feeling towards fruit, its glory and abundance, is I would say universal... We respond to strawberry fields or cherry orchards with a delight that a cabbage patch or even an elegant vegetable garden cannot provoke." Jane Grigson
  • "This stuff tastes awful; I could have made a fortune selling it in my health-food store." Woody Allen, 'Sleeper'
  • "This [the movie Babe] is the way Americans want to think of pigs. Real-life 'Babes' see no sun in their limited lives, with no hay to lie on, no mud to roll in. The sows live in tiny cages, so narrow they can't even turn around. They live over metal grates, and their waste is pushed through slats beneath them and flushed into huge pits." Morley Safer
  • "This was a good enough dinner, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to." Samuel Johnson
  • "Those from whom nature has withheld taste invented trousers." Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "Those magazine dieting stories always have the testimonials of a woman who wore a dress that could slip-cover New Jersey in one photo and thirty days later looked like a well-dressed thermometer." Erma Bombeck
  • "Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it." Author Unknown
  • "'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai." Leo Tolstoy
  • "Three things are good in little measure and evil in large: yeast, salt, and hesitation." Talmud
  • "Three million frog's legs are served in Paris -- daily. Nobody knows what became of the rest of the frogs." Fred Allen
  • "Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes." Robert Greene
  • "'tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers." William Shakespeare
  • "Tis not her coldness, father,
    That chills my labouring breast;
    It's that confounded cucumber
    I've ate and can't digest." Richard Harris Barham
  • "'Tis not the meat, but 'tis the appetite make eating a delight." Sir John Suckling
  • "’Twas a woman who drove me to drink. I never had the courtesy to thank her." WC Fields
  • "To barbecue is a way of life rather than a desirable method of cooking." Clement Freud
  • "To be a gourmet you must start early, as you must begin riding early to be a good horseman. You must live in France, your father must have been a gourmet. Nothing in life must interest you but your stomach." Ludwig Bemelmans
  • "To be always intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it - this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed." Sir Walter Scott
  • "To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue." William F. Buckley, Jr.
  • "To eat is human, to digest--divine." Thai proverb
  • "To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory." Brendan Behan
  • "To know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself." Mao Tse-tung
  • "To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist - the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know how much oil one must mix with one's vinegar." Oscar Wilde
  • "To me, an airplane is a great place to diet." Wolfgang Puck
  • "To me, peanut butter is the breakfast of champions!" Greg Louganis
  • "To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body." Mahatma Gandhi
  • "To the goggling unbeliever [Texans] say -- as people always say about their mangier dishes --'but it's just like chicken, only tenderer.' Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken, only tougher." Alistair Cooke
  • "To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a home might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation." Emily Post
  • "To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting." Edmund Burke
  • "Toast-making is like nose-picking: it's best if you do it yourself." Anonymous
  • "Today we had a lunch for Jaime de Pinies, the president of the General Assembly, then we had cocktails with the foreign minister of Austria. We passed through a Chinese dinner, and now we are here. It's our life." Otilia Barbosa de Medina (wife of Portugal's ambassador to the UN)
  • "Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good." Alice May Brock
  • "Tongue - a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of a dead cow." Bob Ekstrom
  • "Too many cooks may spoil the broth, but it only takes one to burn it." Madeleine Bingham
  • "Too many cooks spoil the brothel." Polly Adler
  • "Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right." Mark Twain
  • "Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." Mark Twain
  • "TRICHINOSIS, n. The pig's reply to proponents of porcophagy." Ambrose Bierce
  • "TRUFFLES: "The most learned men have been questioned as to the nature of this tuber, and after two thousand years of argument and discussion their answer is the same as it was on the first day: we do not know. The truffles themselves have been interrogated, and have answered simply: eat us and praise the Lord." Alexandre Dumas
  • "Truffles must come to the table in their own stock [and] as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine -- if you have never visited it -- the desolate kingdom where it rules." Colette
  • "Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs. We live by the death of others: we are burial places! I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men." Leonardo da Vinci
  • "Try to cook so that it will surprise a little, agreeably... and astonish slightly, without shocking." Jean Marie Amat
  • "TURKEY, n. A large bird whose flesh when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude. Incidentally, it is pretty good eating." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Turkey is undoubtedly one of the best gifts that the New World has made to the Old." Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "Turkey takes so much time to chew. The only thing I ever give thanks for at Thanksgiving is that I've swallowed it." Sam Greene
  • "TURKEY: This bird has various meanings depending on the action in your dream. If you saw one strutting and/or heard it gobbling, it portends a period of confusion due to instability of your friends or associates. However, if you ate it, you are likely to make a serious error in judgment." Barbara Condrony
  • "Un cuisinier, quand je dine, Me semble un etre divin." Desaugiers
  • "Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread, and pumpkin pie." Jim Davis, Garfield
  • "Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Vegetables are substances used by children to balance their plates while carrying them to and from the table." Anonymous
  • "Vegetarian: A person who eats only side dishes." Gerald Lieberman
  • "Vegetarian: Indian word for lousy hunter." Andy Rooney
  • "Vegetarianism can easily reach religious proportions. Refraining from meat on moral grounds serves to dignify feelings of guilt toward sad-eyed, furry creatures and substitutes righteousness for squeamishness." Bill Griffith
  • "Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it's apt to give a person wind and self-righteousness." Robert Hutchinson
  • "Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes and laugh in a cold, calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, favor beards." J.B. Morton
  • "Velveeta: you can eat it -- or wax your car with it!" Judy Garland
  • "Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass." Fran Lebowitz
  • "Waiter, there's no fly in my soup!" Kermit the Frog
  • "Waitresses who are tipped don't spill." anonymous sign in diner
  • "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate." Margaret Atwood
  • "Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anyone." Mark Twain
  • "We all have hometown appetites. Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown [he or she] left behind." Clementine Paddleford
  • "We all love animals. Why do we call some 'pets' and others 'dinner?'" k.d. lang
  • "We are all dietetic sinners; only a small percent of what we eat nourishes us; the balance goes to waste and loss of energy." William Osler
  • "We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons." Alfred E. Newman
  • "We cooked for eight and served four, knowing that the next day we would enjoy the repeat performance." Ruth and Skitch Henderson
  • "We don't need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could." James Cromwell
  • "We had too much camel in the fridge, so I tried some ways to preserve it." Otto Goebel
  • "We load up on oat bran in the morning so we'll live forever. Then we spend the rest of the day living like there's no tomorrow." Lee Iacocca
  • "We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do." Rabindranath Tagore
  • "We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun." George Orwell
  • "We may live without friends; We may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks." Meredith Owen
  • "We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen." Joseph Conrad
  • "We plan, we toil, we suffer -- in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake up just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs. And, again I cry, how rarely it happens! But when it does happen -- then what a moment, what a morning, what a delight!" J. B. Priestley
  • "We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at." Numbers (11:5-6)
  • "We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink." Epicurus
  • "We (the Chinese) eat food for its texture, the elastic or crisp effect it has on our teeth, as well as for fragrance, flavor and color." Lin Yutang
  • "We think fast food is equivalent to pornography, nutritionally speaking." Steve Elbert
  • "We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight." Ernest Hemingway
  • "We were taken to a fast-food cafe where our order was fed into a computer. Our hamburger, made from the flesh of chemically impregnated cattle, had been broiled over counterfeit charcoal, placed between slices of artificially flavored cardboard and served to us by recycled juvenile delinquents." Jean Michel Chapereau
  • "Welcome to the Church of the Holy Cabbage. Lettuce pray." Author Unknown
  • "What? Sunday morning in an English family and no sausages? God bless my soul, what’s the world coming to?" Dorothy Sayers
  • "What comforted me? That is easy. It was a strong cold chicken jelly so very, very thick. My mother's Chinese cook would fix it. He would cook it down, condense it--this broth with all sorts of feet in it, then it would gell into sheer bliss. It kept me alive once for three weeks when I was ill as a child. And I've always craved it since." James Beard
  • "What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba. It means knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms and spices... It means the economy of your great-grandmother and the science of modern chemistry, and French art, and Arabian hospitality. It means, in fine, that you are to see imperatively that everyone has something nice to eat." John Ruskin
  • "What good is it if I talk in flowers while you're thinking in pastry?" Ashley Brilliant
  • "What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour, then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing. It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles." Nora Ephron
  • "What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow." A.A. Milne
  • "What is a roofless cathedral compared to a well-built pie." William Maginn
  • "What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?" Lin Yutang
  • "What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander, but it is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen." Alice B. Toklas
  • "What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye?
  • What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie?" John Greenleaf Whittier
  • "What science demands more study than Cookery? You have not only, as in other arts, to satisfy the general eye, but also the individual taste of the persons who employ you; you have to attend to economy, which every one demands; to suit the taste of different persons at the same table; to surmount the difficulty of procuring things which are necessary to your work; to undergo the want of unanimity among the servants of the house; and the mortification of seeing unlimited confidence sometimes reposed in persons who are unqualified to give orders in the kitchen, without assuming consequence, and giving themselves airs which are almost out of reason, and which frequently discourage the Cook." Louis Eustache Ude
  • "What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head." Andrew Marvell
  • "What you eat and drink is 50 percent of life." Gerard Depardieu
  • "What you have, eat." Hawaiian proverb
  • "WHEAT, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can with some difficulty be made, and which is used also for bread. The French are said to eat more bread per capita of population than any other people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable." Ambrose Bierce
  • "When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste." Laiko Bahrs
  • "When eating bamboo shoots, remember the men who planted them." Chinese proverb
  • "When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day's occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn. The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain." Bernard De Voto (in praise of martinis)
  • "When I drink, I think; and when I think, I drink" Francois Rabelais
  • "When I think of Indonesia -- a country on the equator with 180 million people, a median age of 18, and a Muslim ban on alcohol -- I feel I know what heaven looks like." unnamed Coca Cola official
  • "When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook’s strongest ally…" Laurie Colwin
  • "When my mother had to get dinner for eight she'd just make enough for sixteen and only serve half." Gracie Allen
  • "When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat." Mark Twain
  • "When ordering lunch, the big executives are just as indecisive as the rest of us." William Feather
  • "When she goes about her kitchen duties, chopping, carving, mixing, whisking, she moves with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, her fingers plying the food with the dexterity of a croupier." Craig Claiborne
  • "When the waitress puts the dinner on the table the old men look at the dinner. The young men look at the waitress." Gelett Burgess
  • "When the wine [made at her chateau] is in the golden period of effervescing, any sick child in the village ticketed by the doctor can be brought to the wine-presses and dipped in. If labeled 'tres malade,' he is dipped in twice." Lillie de Hergermann-Lindencrone
  • "When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee:
    And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite." Proverbs 23:1-2
  • "When we decode a cookbook, every one of us is a practicing chemist. Cooking is really the oldest, most basic application of physical and chemical forces to natural materials." Arthur E. Grosser
  • "When we lose, I eat. When we win, I eat. I also eat when we're rained out." Tommy Lasorda
  • "When you become a good cook, you become a good craftsman, first. You repeat and repeat and repeat until your hands know how to move without thinking about it." Jacques Pepin
  • "When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if it's not, mmmmmmmm, boy." Jack Handey
  • "When you find a waiter who is a waiter and not an actor, writer, musician or poet, you've found a jewel." Andre Soltner
  • "Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet magazine." Nora Ephron
  • "Where do you go to get anorexia?" Shelly Winters
  • "Who riseth from a feast
    With that keen appetite that he sits down?" William Shakespeare
  • "Whoever tells a lie cannot be pure in heart -- and only the pure in heart can make good soup." Ludwig van Beethoven
  • "While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?" George Bernard Shaw
  • "Whilst it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork." Fran Leibowitz
  • "Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God. I could be eating a slow learner." Lynda Montgomery
  • "Why, then the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open." William Shakespeare
  • "Why, you might just as well say that, "I see what I eat," is the same as, "I eat what I see." Lewis Carroll
  • "WINE, n. Fermented grape-juice known to the Women's Christian Union as "liquor," sometimes as "rum." Wine, madam, is God's next best gift to man." Ambrose Bierce
  • "Wine - the intellectual part of the meal" Alexandre Dumas
  • "Wine acts as a cordial and stimulant; quickening the action of the heart and arteries, diffusing an agreeable warmth over the body, promoting the different secretions, communicating a sense of increased muscular force, exalting the nerveous energy, and banishing all unpleasant feelings from the mind." Alexander Henderson
  • "Wine enlivens the human soul." Euripedes
  • "Wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health." Thomas Jefferson
  • "Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. This is one of the disadvantages of wine: it makes a man mistake words for thoughts." Samuel Johnson
  • "Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good." Samuel Johnson
  • "Wine is a constant proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Benjamin Franklin
  • "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging; and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise." Proverbs 20:1
  • "Wine is a splendid thing in and of itself, but it is nonetheless proper to examine the high nutritional and hygienic values of wine from a scientific point of view. We are convinced that scientists will thus perform a service to mankind, since at the same time they will help determine the measure beyond which its use is a misuse for all creation." Pope Pius XII
  • "Wine is bottled poetry." Robert Louis Stevenson
  • "Wine is harmful in large quantities and beneficial in small quantities." The Minor Tractates of the Talmud
  • "Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living." Napoleon
  • "Wine is sunlight, held together by water." Galileo
  • "Wine is the head of all medicines...where wine is lacking, drugs are necessary." Babylonian Talmud
  • "Wine is the most civilized thing in the world." Ernest Hemingway
  • "Wine is the most healthful and the most hygienic of beverages." Louis Pasteur
  • "Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance" Benjamin Franklin
  • "Wine refreshes the stomach, sharpens the appetite, blunts care and sadness, and conduces to slumber." Pliny the Elder
  • "Wine to me is passion. It's family and friends. It's warmth of heart and generosity of spirit. Wine is art. It's culture. It's the essence of civilization and the art of living." Robert Mondavi
  • "Wine was given us by God, not that we might be drunken, but that we might be sober. It is the best medicine when it has the best moderation to direct it. Wine was given to restore the body's weakness, not to overturn the soul's strength." Saint John Chrysostom
  • "Wine, one of the noblest cordials in nature." John Wesley
  • "Wine, women, baths, by art or nature varme, Us'd or abus'ed do men much good or harme." Regimen Sanitatis Salernitarum
  • "Wish I had time for just one more bowl of chili." Kit Carson's last words
  • "Without butter, without eggs, there is no reason to come to France." Paul Bocuse
  • "Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos." Don Kardong
  • "Without my morning coffee I'm just like a dried up piece of roast goat." Johann Sebastian Bach
  • "Woe to the cook whose sauce has no sting." Geoffrey Chaucer
  • "Women cannot make a good book of cookery." Samuel Johnson
  • "Worries go down better with soup than without." Jewish Proverb
  • "'Yes that's it' said Hatter with a sigh: 'it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.’" Lewis Carroll
  • "You are eating the sea, that's it, only the sensation of a gulp of seawater has been wafted out of it by some sorcery, and are on the verge of remembering you don't know what, mermaids or the sudden smell of kelp on the ebb tide or a poem you read once, something connected with the flavor of life itself." Eleanor Clark (on oysters)
  • "You are offered a piece of bread and butter that feels like a damp handkerchief and sometimes, when cucumber is added to it, like a wet one." Sir Compton MacKenzie, on English tea-parties
  • "You are what you eat, and who wants to be a lettuce?" Peter Burns (on vegetarianism)
  • "You are what you eat. For example, if you eat garlic you're apt to be a hermit." Franklin P. Jones
  • "You balance the plate between the forefinger and three other fingers, which make a little platform, and with the forefinger and the thumb you grasp the glass and if you think that isn't hazardous, you haven't done it lately." Bonnie Angelo
  • "You better cut the pizza into four slices, because I'm not hungry enough to eat six." Yogi Berra
  • "You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars." Charles Kuralt
  • "You can say this for ready-mixes - the next generation isn't going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother used to make." Earl Wilson
  • "You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans." Ronald Reagan
  • "You can tell how long a couple has been married by whether they are on their first, second or third bottle of Tabasco." Bruce Bye
  • "You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread." Henry Miller
  • "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer." Frank Zappa
  • "You cannot seal in a can the shining of the sun or the blue of the sky." How to Eat in Genoa: A Gastronomical Itinerary
  • "You cannot sell a blemished apple in the supermarket, but you can sell a tasteless one provided it is shiny, smooth, even, uniform and bright." Elspeth Huxley
  • "You can't barbecue in New York; you'd have to keep vacuuming the meat." Rhoda
  • "You do not sew with a fork and I see no reason why you should eat with knitting needles." Henry Beard, on chopsticks
  • "You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?" Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
  • "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • "You have to ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste." Goethe
  • "You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with …a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism." Erma Bombeck
  • "You know, the best Wiener schnitzel I've ever eaten in my life is not that much better than the worst Wiener schnitzel I've ever eaten in my life." diner at Danube in New York
  • "You may feel that you have eaten too much...But this pastry is like feathers - it is like snow. It is in fact good for you, a digestive!" M. F. K. Fisher
  • "You must be careful about giving any drink whatsoever to a bore. A lit-up bore is the worst in the world." David Cecil
  • "You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed." Saki
  • "You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made. Even after you eat it, it stays with you -- always." Chef Bugnard
  • "You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car." Harvey Diamond
  • "You take romance -- I'll take Jell-O." Ella Fitzgerald
  • "You think that I am cruel and gluttonous when I beat my cook for sending in a bad dinner. But if that is too trivial a cause, what other can there be for beating a cook?" Martial
  • "Young misses whut eats heavy mos' gener'ly doan never ketch husbands." Mammy to Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind

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