Compilation of interesting food quotes
“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 (1918--) American author.
“For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.”
Barbara Ehrenreich, author, social critic
“I eat merely to put food out of my mind.”
N.F. Simpson (1919--)
“In our opinion food should be sniffed lustily at table, both as a matter of precaution and as a matter of enjoyment, the sniffing of it to be regarded in the same light as the tasting of it.”
E.B. White (1899-1985) American essayist
“Food is our common ground, a universal experience.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
“Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available.”
Pearl Buck (1892-1973) American Nobel Prize winning author.
“Food is the most primitive form of comfort.”
Sheilah Graham (1904-1988)
“Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the single most significant trademarks of a culture.”
Mark Kurlansky, 'Choice Cuts' (2002)
"Food to a large extent is what holds a society together and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences."
Peter Farb and George Armelagos - 'Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating'
"Enchant, stay beautiful and graceful, but do this, eat well. Bring the same consideration to the preparation of your food as you devote to your appearance. Let your dinner be a poem, like your dress."
Charles Pierre Monselet, French author (1825-1888)- ‘Letters to Emily’
“It is coarse and ungraceful to throw food into the mouth as you would toss hay into a barn with a pitchfork.”
‘Art of the Table’, Suzanne Von Drachenfels (2000)
"Make [food] simple and let things taste of what they are."
Curnonsky (Maurice Edmond Sailland)- French writer (1872-1956)
"Food responds to our soul's dream as to our stomach's appetite."
Joseph Delteil (1894-1978) French writer- ‘La Cuisine paléolithique’, 1964)
"What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others."
Lucretius (1st century BC)
"Food is not about impressing people. It's about making them feel comfortable."
Ina Garten, 'The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook'
"All I ask of food is that it doesn't harm me."
Michael Palin (Monty Python’s Flying Circus)
"Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food."
Hippocrates
"Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry."
Charles Baudelaire, French poet (1821-1867)
"The food that enters the mind must be watched as closely as the food that enters the body."
Patrick Buchanan, ‘Right From the Beginning’
"Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water."
W.C. Fields
"If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either."
Joseph Wood Krutch, naturalist (1893-1970)
"Food is an important part of a balanced diet."
Fran Lebowitz, 'Food for Thought and Vice Versa'
"If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food."
Lin Yutang, ‘My Country and My People’
"More die in the United States of too much food than of too little."
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, ‘The Affluent Society’
"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
"It is illegal to give someone food in which has been found a dead mouse or weasel."
Ancient Irish law
"Food, like a loving touch or a glimpse of divine power, has that ability to comfort."
Norman Kolpas
"Food...can look beautiful, taste exquisite, smell wonderful, make people feel good, bring them together, inspire romantic feelings....At its most basic, it is fuel for a hungry machine;...."
Rosamond Richardson, English cookery author
"Food: Part of the spiritual expression of the French, and I do not believe that they have ever heard of calories."
Beverley Baxter
"Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage."
Woody Allen, 'Without Feathers'
“When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.”
Desiderius Erasmus
“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of 'Lord of the Rings' (1892-1973)
“Thy food is such as hath been belched on by infected lungs.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
“Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well mitched they are as body and soul, living partners.”
Andre Simon (1877-1970)
"Food to a large extent is what holds a society together and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences."
'Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating'- Peter Farb and George Armelagos
“In the social state to which we have come today, it is hard to imagine a nation which would live solely on bread and vegetables.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)- ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
"I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer."
Brendan Behan, Irish author (1923-1964)
“The economy of the kitchen is only a counterpart, in its simplicity or complication, its rudeness or luxury, of the economy of the State. The perfectibility of cookery indicates the perfectibility of society. The progress of cookery is the progress of civilisation.”
Frederick W. Hackwood, ‘Good Cheer’ (1911)
“You arouse my gastronomic juices, madame.”
Hercule Poirot in 'The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding', by Agatha Christie
“Gastronomy is the intelligent knowledge of whatever concerns man's nourishment.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) - ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
"To preside over a political chamber or to hold a post in an embassy, is to take a course in gastronomy."
Antonin Carême (Marie-Antoine Carême) (1783-1833)
"Gastronomy, has been the joy of all peoples through the ages. It produces beauty and wit and goes hand in hand with goodness of heart and a consideration of others."
Charles Pierre Monselet (1825-88) French author.
"All passions, rationalized and controlled, become an art: gastronomy, more than any other passion, is sensitive to rationalism and direction."
Charles Pierre Monselet
“Thus it is Gastronomy, to tell the truth, which motivates the farmers, fineyardists, fishermen, hunters, and the great family of cooks, no matter under what names or qualifications they may disguise their part in the preparation of foods.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) - ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
"Gastronomy is the joy of all conditions and all ages. It adds wit to beauty."
Charles Pierre Monselet
"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 goose is nothing, but man has made of it an instrument for the output of a marvelous product, a kind of living hothouse in which there grows the supreme fruit of gastronomy.”
Charles Gérard, ‘L'Ancienne Alsace à table’
“A connoisseur of gastronomy was congratulated on his appointment as a director of indirect contributions at Perigues: and, above all, in the pleasure there would be in living in the midst of good cheer, in the country of truffles, partridges, gruffled turkeys, and so forth. "Alas!" replied with a sigh the sad gastronomer, "can one really live at all in a country where there is no fresh sea-fish?"
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1825)1755-1826
“True gastronomy is making the most of what is available, however modest.”
Claudia Roden, food writer, ‘Picnic’ (1981)
“The smell of roasting meat together with that of burning fruit wood and dried herbs, as voluptuous as incense in a church, is enough to turn anyone into a budding gastronome.”
Claudia Roden, food writer, ‘Picnic’ (1981)
"To order and conduct a dinner is given only to fine gastronomes, of delicate and cultivated tastes; an able host is as rare as a good cook."
Lucien Tendret (1825-1896) French lawyer
"If there are gastronomes by predestination, then there are also some by circumstance."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
"One only dines well at the homes of true gastronomes who feel all the nuances: the least puffiness spoils the loveliest of faces and attention to detail creates perfection."
Lucien Tendret (1825-1896) French lawyer
"To make people who have no appetite eat, to make the wit of those who have it sparkle, to enable those who want these qualities to find them -- this is the supreme science of a gastronome-host."
Lucien Tendret
"A true gastronome should always be ready to eat, just as a soldier should always be ready to fight."
Charles Pierre Monselet (1825-1888)- French journalist and author.
“The gastronome is at the same time inquisitive and timid; he explores faint-heartedly. He spends half his time remembering past satisfactions and the other half skeptically calculating future possibilities.”
J.F. Revel in 'Un festin en paroles'
“Cannibal: a gastronome of the old school.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) - 'The Devil's Dictionary' (1911)
“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 (1908-1992) - 'An Alphabet for Gourmets' (1949)
“Gastronomical perfection can be reaches in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hillside; two persons, no matter of what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home. The six should be capable of decent social behaviour: that is, no two of them should be so much in love as to bore the others, nor, at the opposite extreme, should they be carrying on any sexual or professional feud which could put poison in the plates all must eat from.”
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (1963)
“For a growing number of Americans, cooking, an activity that was once an obligation, has become a spectator sport.”
New York Times (1989)
“You will never get out of pot or pan anything fundamentally better than what went into it. Cooking is not alchemy; there is no magic in the pot.”
'Dishes & Beverages Of The Old South'
Martha McCulloch-Williams (1913)
“I can't cook. I use a smoke alarm as a timer.”
Carol Siskind, American Comedianne.
“I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.”
Katherine Cebrian, Artist, writer
“By November I had convinced myself that I had better things to do than read 'Moby Dick' and learn about the Continental Congress. Cook for instance.”
Ruth Reichi, 'Tender at the Bone' (1998)
Cooking "is a form of flattery....a mischievous, deceitful, mean and ignoble activity, which cheats us by shapes and colors, by smoothing and draping...."
Plato (427-347 B.C.) Greek philosopher in ‘Choice Cuts’ by Mark Kurlansky, 2002)
"Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
"The beautiful and the good are identical but the fleeting impressions created by the work of a cook or a musician disperse even as they are being experienced. Raphael's painting The Transfiguration is immortal, but Carême's 'Ragout de truffes à la parisienne' lasts while it is being eaten, just as roses that last as long as their fragrance can be enjoyed."
Lucien Tendret (1825-1896)- French lawyer, great-nephew of Brillat-Savarin.
"Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet."
Julia Child
"Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music."
Julia Child
"When we no longer have good cooking in the world, we will have no literature, nor high and sharp intelligence, nor friendly gatherings, no social harmony."
Marie-Antoine Carême
"She did not so much cook as assassinate food."
Storm Jameson (Margaret)
"When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking."
Gail Sheehy
"She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist."
Janet Flanner writing about the death of Mother Soret of Lyons, whose 'chicken in half mourning' was famous all over France.
"But, lady, as women, what wisdom may be ours if not the philosophies of the kitchen? Lupercio Leonardo spoke well when he said: 'how well one may philosophize when preparing dinner.' And I often say, when observing these trivial details: had Aristotle prepared vituals [sic], he would have written more."
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican nun, 300 years ago.
"Cooking is like love, it should be entered into with abandon or not at all"
Harriet van Horne
"Light, refined, learned and noble, harmonious and orderly, clear and logical, the cooking of France is, in some strange manner, intimately linked to the genius of her greatest men."
Rouff (Marcel) French journalist and writer (1887-1936)
"Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love."
Craig Claiborne, Kitchen Primer
"I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate."
Julia Child
"The dishes of the present day are very light, and they have a particular delicacy and perfume. The secret has been discovered of enabling us to eat more and to eat better, as also to digest more rapidly....The new cookery is conductive to health, to good temper, and to long life....Who could enumerate all the dishes of the new cuisine? It is an absolutely new idiom. I have tasted viands prepared in so many ways and fashioned with such art that I could not imagine what they were."
Louis Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 1781-82
"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
"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
"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 naïve, or Van Gogh, the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love."
Keith Floyd, ‘A Feast of Floyd’
"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
"The greatest animal in creation, the animal who cooks."
Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
"Cooking should be a carefully balanced reflection of all the good things of the earth."
Jean & Pierre Troisgros
"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 (1847-1963)
"When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste."
Laiko Bahrs
“Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.”
Marcella Hazan
“When compelled to cook, I produce a meal that would make a sword swallower gag.”
Russell Baker (1925-?)
“Once learnt, this business of cooking was to prove an ever growing burden. It scarcely bears thinking about, the time and labour that man and womankind has devoted to the preparation of dishes that are to melt and vanish in a moment like smoke or a dream, like a shadow, and as a post that hastes by, and the air closes behind them, afterwards no sign where they went is to be found.”
Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) ‘Personal Pleasures’
“What is literature compared with cooking? The one is shadow, the other is substance.”
E. V. Lucas (1868-1938) ‘365 Days and One More’
"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
“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 (1877-1970)- ‘The Concise Encyclopedia of Gastronomy’ (1952)
“The keynote to happiness within the four walls that make any home is plain, wholesome, well cooked food, attractively served.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“The difference between good and bad cookery can scarcely be more strikingly shown than in the manner in which sauces are prepared and served. If well made....they prove that both skill and taste have been exerted in its arrangements. When coarsely or carelessly prepared....they greatly discredit the cook.”
Eliza Acton
‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)
“A well made sauce will make even an elephant or a grandfather palatable.”
Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)
"Pork at walking pace, beef at a trot, game at a gallop."
Joseph Delteil, French writer ‘La Cuisine paleolithique’ (1964)
“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 (1755-1826)
“All cooking is a matter of time. In general, the more time the better.”
John Erskine, 'The Complete Life'
“I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast at any time'. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”
Steven Wright
"When there is no more cookery in the world, there will be no more letters, no quick and lofty intelligence, no pleasant easy relationships; no more social unity."
Antonin Carême (Marie-Antoine Carême) (1783-1833)
"Good cookery is the food of a pure conscience."
Des Essarts (French actor) (1740-1793)
"Cookery is an old art, as it goes back to Adam."
Marquis de Cussy
“In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art in Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies -- loaf givers."
John Ruskin, Quoted in the first edition of the ‘Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896).
"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 (1813)
"Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery."
Fannie Farmer
"Kissing don't last: cookery do!"
George Meredith, British novelist (1828-1909)
"Cookery is like matrimony. Two things served together should match. Clear should go with clear, thick with thick, hard with hard, and soft with soft. I have known people to mix grated lobster with birds' nests, and mint with chicken or pork!"
Yuan Mei, 18th century Chinese gastronome
"Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements."
Marcel Boulestin
"Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen."
Robert Burton (1577-1640)
"There are few decisive acts in cookery, each step contributes to the end result."
Claude Peyrot, 20th century French Chef
“As in the fine arts, the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, so in the art of cookery is the progress gradual from the earliest and simplest modes, to those of the most complicated and refined.”
Isabella Beeton (1836-1865) -‘The Book of Household Management’ (1861)
“Cookery is as old as the world, but it must also remain, always, as modern as fashion.”
Phileas Gilbert (1857-1942)
“Cookery is naturally the most ancient of the arts, as of all arts it is the most important.”
George Ellwanger (1848-1906) ‘Pleasures of the Table’ (1902)
“Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, or rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the latest cultivated branches of the science.”
Frederick Accum (1769-1838)
“The economy of the kitchen is only a counterpart, in its simplicity or complication, its rudeness or luxury, of the economy of the State. The perfectibility of cookery indicates the perfectibility of society. The progress of cookery is the progress of civilisation.”
Frederick W. Hackwood, ‘Good Cheer’ (1911)
"Unquiet meals make ill digestions."
William Shakespeare
“One can say everything best over a meal.”
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (1819-1880)
“Nearly everyone wants as least one outstanding meal a day.”
Duncan Hines, American food critic and writer of food and lodging guidebooks. (1880-1959)
“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 (1865-1936)
“Soup is to the meal, what the hostesses smile of welcome is to the party. A prelude to the goodness to come.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“Dessert should close the meal gently and not in a pyrotechnic blaze of glory. No cultivated feeder, already well fed, thanks his host for confronting him with a dessert so elaborate that not to eat it is simply rude - like refusing to watch one's host blow up Bloomingdale's.”
Alan Koehler (‘Madison Avenue Cook Book’)
“Wine is the intellectual part of a meal while meat is the material.”
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
“The meal was pretentious -- a kind of beetroot soup with greasy croutons; pork underdone with loud vulgar cabbage, potato croquettes, tinned peas in tiny jam-tart cases, watery gooseberry sauce; trifle made with a resinous wine, so jammy that all my teeth lit up at once.”
Anthony Burgess, English novelist (1917-1993)
“I want order and taste. A well displayed meal is enhanced one hundred per cent in my eyes.”
Antonin Careme (1783-1833)
“To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“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
“Everybody's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.”
Colman McCarthy, Columnist, ‘The Washington Post’
“It may be safely averred that good cookery is the best and truest economy, turning to full account every wholesome article of food, and converting into palatable meals what the ignorant either render uneatable or throw away in disdain.”
Eliza Acton, ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)
“A good meal must be as harmonious as a symphony and as well-constructed as a Norman cathedral.”
Fernand Point, ‘Ma gastronomie’ (1897-1955)
“Wine makes a symphony of a good meal.”
Fernande Garvin, ‘The Art of French Cooking’
“A good meal soothes the soul as it regenerates the body. From the abundance of it flows a benign benevolence. A good and copius dinner begets a mellowing influence; it permeates the bosom with a bland philanthropy of sentiment, embracive of all classes, sects and races of man.”
Frederick W. Hackwood, ‘Good Cheer’ (1911)
He described the pig as "an encyclopedic animal, a meal on legs."
Grimod de la Reynière (1758-1838)
“A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin
“Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
“An honest laborious Country-man, with good Bread, Salt and a little Parsley, will make a contented Meal with a roasted Onion”
John Evelyn (1620-1706)
“Anyone who eats three meals a day should understand why cookbooks outsell sex books three to one.”
L. M. Boyd
“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 (Titus Livius), Roman historian (59-17 B.C.)- ‘The Annals of the Roman People’
“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 (1788-1824) ‘Don Juan’
“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 Désaugiers (1772-1827)
“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
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“But when the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface.”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
“When my mother had to get dinner for 8 she'd make enough for 16 and only serve half.”
Gracie Allen
“You need not rest your reputation on the dinners you give.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“The dinner is the happy end of the Briton's day. We work harder than the other nations of the earth. We do more, we live more in our time, than Frenchmen or Germans. Every great man amongst us likes his dinner, and takes to it kindly.”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
“You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.”
Oscar Wilde, 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (1895)
“His life was chiefly made up of dinners, of journeys to and from dinners, of talks about past dinners, and of speculations upon future dinners.”
Hesketh Pearson, 'The Smith of Smiths' (1934)
“The success of the dinner depends as much upon the company as the cook. Discordant elements - people invited alphabetically, or to pay off debts - are fatal.”
Ward McAllister, 'Society As I Have Found It' (1890)
“Let me cook the dinners of a nation, and I shall not care who makes its laws.”
'Dishes & Beverages Of The Old South - Martha McCulloch-Williams (1913)
“Hold your Council before Dinner; the full Belly hates Thinking as well as Acting.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac
“No wonder Tom grows fat, th' unweildy Sinner,
Makes his whole Life but one continual Dinner.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
"Everything is done at dinner in the century in which we live, and it is by these dinners that men are governed."
Charles Pierre Monselet (1825-1888) - French journalist and author
"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, food and lodging critic (1880-1959)
"After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one's relatives."
Oscar Wilde
"One morning, as I went to the freezer door, I asked my wife, 'What should I take out for dinner?' Without a moment's hesitation, she replied, 'Me.'"
anonymous
"A man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
"Americans are just beginning to regard food the way the French always have. Dinner is not what you do in the evening before something else. Dinner is the evening."
Art Buchwald
"Sir, respect your dinner: idolize it, enjoy it properly. You will be many hours in the week, many weeks in the year, and many years in your life happier if you do."
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
"Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."
Adelle Davis (1904-1974)
"A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner."
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
"All human history attests That happiness for man,--the hungry sinner!-- Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner."
Lord Byron (1788-1824) - ‘The Island’, Canto xiii Stanza 99
Dinner is the "principal act of the day that can only be carried out in a worthy manner by people of wit and humor; for it is not sufficient just to eat at dinner. One has to talk with a calm and discreet gaiety. The conversation must sparkle like the rubies in the entremets wines, it must be delightfully suave with the sweetmeats of the dessert, and become very profound with the coffee."
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
“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, English novelist (1815-1882)
“We had for Dinner a Calf's Head, boiled Fowl and tongue, a Saddle of Mutton Roasted on the Side Table, and a fine Swan roasted with Currant Jelly Sauce for the first Course. The second Course a couple of Wild Fowl called Dun Fowls, Larks, Blancmange, Tarts etc. etc. and a good Dessert of Fruit after amongst which was a Damson Cheese. I never eat a bit of Swan before, and I think it good eating with sweet sauce. The Swan was killed three weeks before it was eat and yet not the least bad taste in it.”
James Woodforde, 18th century English country parson - ‘Diary of a Country Parson’, January 28th 1780
“Dinner was made for eatin' not for talkin'.”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
“Dinners are given mostly in the middle classes by way of revenge.”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) - ‘The Book of Snobs’ (1847)
“They take great pride in making their dinner cost much; I take my pride in making my dinner cost so little.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
“Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.”
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
“A clear soup, a bit of fish, a couple of little entrees and a nice little roast. That's my kind of a dinner.”
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
“He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?”
Pink Floyd, 'Another Brick in the Wall, Part II (1979)
“Meat Meat! We are going to eat some meat; and what meat! Real game! Still no bread, though.”
Ned Land in Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870)
“The poor man must walk to get meat for his stomach, the rich man to get a stomach to his meat.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Poor Richard's Almanac
“
"Much meat, much malady."
Thomas Fuller, English clergyman (1608-1661)
“A human can 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 Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Russian author (1828-1910)
“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, American novelist (1896-1956)
“Recognize meat for what is really is: the antibiotic and pesticide laden corpse of a tortured animal.”
Ingrid Newkirk (President of PETA)
"There was an Old Person of Biythe,
Who cut up his meat with a scythe;
When they said, 'Well! I never!' - he cried,
'Scythes for ever!'
That lively Old Person of Biythe."
Edward Lear, English artist, writer;(1812-1888)
“Beware of meat twice boil'd, & an old foe reconcil'd.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)’ Poor Richard's Almanac’
"Red meat is not bad for you. Now blue-green meat, that’s bad for you!"
Tommy Smothers
“Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.”
Fran Lebowitz ('Metropolitan Life')
“Veal is the quintessential Lonely Guy meat. There's something pale and lonely about it, especially if it doesn't have any veins. It's so wan and Kierkegaardian. you just know it's not going to hurt you.”
Bruce Jay Friedman (1930- ) ‘The Lonely Guy Cookbook’ (1976)
“Don't take a butcher's advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he'd be a chef."
Andy Rooney
“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, ‘Diary in America’ (1837)
“Tastes change. We have recently seen the horse on the verge of replacing the ox, which would be quite just, since the ox had replaced the donkey. Maecenas was the first in Roman times to make use of the flesh of the domestic donkey .....Monsieur Isouard of Malta reports that, as a result of the blockade of the island of Malta by the English and the Neapolitans, the inhabitants were reduced to eating all the horses, dogs, cats, donkeys, and rats: 'This circumstance,' he says, 'led to the discovery that donkey meat was very good; so much so, in fact, that gourmands in the city of Valetta preferred it to the best beef and even veal ..... Particularly boiled, roast, or braised, its flavor is exquisite. The meat is blackish and the fat verging on yellow. However, the donkey must only be three or four years old and must be fat.”
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) ‘Grande Dictionnaire de cuisine’
“The smell of roasting meat together with that of burning fruit wood and dried herbs, as voluptuous as incense in a church, is enough to turn anyone into a budding gastronome.”
Claudia Roden, food writer, Picnic (1981)
“Heaven sends us good meat, but the devil sends us cooks.”
David Garrick (1717-1779), 'Epigram on Goldsmith's Retaliation'
“A clever cook, can make....good meat of a whetstone.”
Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch priest and scholar (1466?-1536)
“Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.”
Fran Lebowitz ('Metropolitan Life')
“Greater eaters of meat are in general more cruel and ferocious than other men.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
When asked about his carving skills, replied: "I just yell at the bird and hope the meat will fall off."
Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet
“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, actor, director, producer, writer (1915-1985)
“A louse in the cabbage is better than no meat at all.”
Pennsylvania Dutch proverb
“As for the garden of mint, the very smell of it alone recovers and refreshes our spirits, as the taste stirs up our appetite for meat,”
Pliny
“But doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 'Much Ado About Nothing'
“It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and tht the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Queen Mab' 1813.
“Don't take a butcher's advice on how to cook meat. If he knew, he'd be a chef."
Andy Rooney
“A clever cook, can make....good meat of a whetstone.”
Desiderius Erasmus Dutch priest and scholar (1466?-1536)
“'Tis burnt, and so is all the meat.
What dogs are these! Where is the rascal cook?
How durst you, villains, bring it from the dresser,
And serve it thus to me that love it not?”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) - ‘Taming of the Shrew’
“If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat?”
Jo Brand, British comedian.
“If the hecatomb of animals we have each consumed in the years we have lived, were marshalled in array before us, we should stand aghast at the possibility of our ever having devoured the quantity of animal food, and sacrificed for out daily meals the goodly number of well-fed quadrupeds of the ovine, bovine, and porcine races, or the fish, fowl, reptiles, and insects, which would thus be re-embodied.”
Peter Lund Simmonds, 'The Curiosities of Food' (1859)
“‘Well said, M. Aronnax,’ replied the Canadian, whose teeth seemed sharpened like the edge of a hatchet; ‘but I will eat tiger -- loin of tiger -- if there is no other quadruped on this island.’"
Ned Land in Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870)
"Greater eaters of meat are in general more cruel and ferocious than other men."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)
“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 (1788-1824) ‘Don Juan’
"A tale without love is like beef without mustard, an insipid dish."
Anatole France, French author
"Beef is the soul of cooking."
Marie-Antoine Carême (1784-1833)
"I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit."
William Shakespeare
"Any of us would kill a cow, rather than not have beef."
Samuel Johnson. English writer (1709-1784)
“Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘King Henry V’
“The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.”
Neal Barnard, M.D.
“Queequeg sat there among them....His greatest admirer could not have cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast....he eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare.”
Herman Melville, ‘Moby Dick’ (1851)
"Then there is the beefsteak. They have it in Europe, but they don't know how to cook it. Neither will they cut it right. It comes on the table in a small, round, pewter platter. It lies in the center of this platter, in a bordering bed of grease-soaked potatoes; it is the size, shape, and thickness of a man's hand with the thumb and fingers cut off. It is a little overdone, is rather dry, it tastes pretty insipidly, it rouses no enthusiasm. Imagine a poor exile contemplating that inert thing, and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him a mighty porter-house steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most unimpeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an outlying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place; and imagine that the angel also adds a great cup of American home-made coffee, with the cream a-froth on top, some real butter, firm and yellow and fresh, some smoking hot biscuits, a plate of hot buckwheat cakes, with transparent syrup, could words describe the gratitude of this exile?"
Mark Twain (1835-1910) (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) ‘A Tramp Abroad’
"Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home-made bread --- there may be."
David Grayson - 'Adventures in Contentment' (1907)
“I would like to find a stew that will give me heartburn immediately, instead of at three o'clock in the morning.”
John Barrymore
“Boeuf a la Bourguignonne (Beef in the Burgundy style): This is the stew of stews, an apotheosis of stew, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the watery, stringy mixture served up in British institutions. It's a rich, carefully cooked recipe which is served up on special occasions in French homes, and which appears without shame on the menus of high-class restaurants.”
Jane Grigson (1928-1990) 'The Mushroom Feast' 1975
“Veal is the quintessential Lonely Guy meat. There's something pale and lonely about it, especially if it doesn't have any veins. It's so wan and Kierkegaardian. you just know it's not going to hurt you.”
Bruce Jay Friedman (1930- ) - ‘The Lonely Guy Cookbook’ (1976)
“Cut round on the top near to the outer edge with a chisel and hammer”
Directions on a can of roast veal - 1824
"There was an Old Man of Three Bridges,
Whose mind was distracted by midges;
He sate on a wheel, eating underdone veal,
Which relieved that Old Man of Three Bridges."
Edward Lear, English artist, writer;(1812-1888)
“Sometimes I pray to Cod for the veal-power to stop playing with my food words, but I fear it's too bread into me. For all I know, the wurst may be yet to come.”
Mark Morton
'Arts & Scantlings' (Gastronomica, Fall 2006)
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“.... I was vexed that there was nothing but a piece of cold lamb in the house & some Marsala, both of which they declined, saying that either Watercresses or small beetles would have been pleasant, but that they were not hungry.”
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; (1812-1888) -[in a Letter to Lady Duncan]
"If you throw a lamb chop in the oven, what's to keep it from getting done?"
Joan Crawford in 'The Women'
"Pork fat rules!”
Emeril Lagasse, celebrity chef, restaurateur.
“Was I catching the contagious enthusiasm of this Canadian? Was I truly euphoric at the sight of fresh-grilled pork?”
Professor M. Aronnax in Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870)
“The food in Yugoslavia is fine if you like pork tartare.”
Ed Begley Jr., 'Quotable Feast', Sarah E. Parvis (2001)
"If you want a subject, look to pork!"
Charles Dickens, ‘Great Expectations’
“Pork, in every form, is indigestible and should never be eaten by persons of weak digestion, by young children, nor by the old and feeble.”
‘The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book’ (1901)
“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 Kellog - ‘Plain Facts for Old and Young’
“Pork at walking pace, beef at a trot, game at a gallop.”
Joseph Delteil (1894-1978) French writer
‘La Cuisine paleolithique’, 1964
“He who cannot eat horsemeat need not do so. Let him eat pork. But he who cannot eat pork, let him eat horsemeat. It's simply a question of taste.”
Nikita Khrushchev
“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 19th century French chef. - ‘The Modern Housewife’ (1851)
“A porkchop in the kitchen is a porkchop; a porkchop in Proust is Proust."
William Gaso, University of North Dakota Writers Conference, 3/21/75
“There is poetry in a pork chop to a hungry man.”
Philip Gibbs (NY Times 1951)
"Poultry is for cookery what canvas is for painting, and the cap of Fortunatus for the charlatans. It is served to us boiled, roast, hot or cold, whole or in portions, with or without sauce, and always with equal success."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
"We were not satisfied with the qualities which nature gave to poultry; art stepped in and, under the pretext of improving fowls, has made martyrs of them."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
“It (pheasant) is the king of earthly poultry, as the primacy of aquatic birds belongs to the swan. What more exquisite flesh can you eat.”
Olivier de Serre
“Poultry is like meat, except when you cook it rare. Then it's like bird-flavored Jello.”
P. J. O'Rourke (1947 - )
“All you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich and you haven't broken any rules.”
Jack Nicholson in 'Five Easy Pieces' (1970)
“Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect. (1867-1959)
“Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.”
Werner Herzog, German film producer, director. (1942- )
"We didn't starve, but we didn't eat chicken unless we were sick, or the chicken was."
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
"If God grants me longer life, I will see to it that no peasant in my kingdom will lack the means to have a chicken in the pot every Sunday."
Henri IV of France, in a conversation with the Duke of Savoy
“Young children and chickens would ever be eating.”
Thomas Tusser, English author (1524-1580) 'Points of Huswifery'
“A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a chicken or turkey or duck in the bary-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living.”
A description of Aunt Chloe in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
“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, chef, food writer (1878-1943) - ‘Simple French Cooking for English Homes’ (1923)
“One evening [in 1759], the marshal of Luxembourg had invited a large number of illustrious guests to his château [Chateau de Montmorency]. Occupying a place of honor on the menu saw a fricassee of chicken in white sauce. When it was time to sit down at table, a messenger arrived: the marshal was summoned without delay to the king's Council. The marshal gave orders that his absence should not delay the serving of the food, and he left. Returning late, and desiring only one dish, he was served with the cold chicken fricassee, congealed in the ivory-colored sauce. He found this food succulent, and a few days later expressed a wish to have it served again. Presented under the name of 'refroidi' (cooled), this term displeased the marshal, who insisted on the name of chaud-froid.”
Phileas Gilbert
“Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them.”
Sylvia Plath, American poet (1932-1963)
“That fellow Béchameil has all the luck! I was serving breast of chicken á la crème more than 20 years before he was born, but I have never had the chance of giving my name to even the most modest sauce.”
Duke of Escars, 17th century
“A chub is the worst fish that swims.”
Izaak Walton (1593-1683) 'The Compleat Angler'
“I know that the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully.”
George W. Bush, 43rd U.S. President (1946- )
“Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.”
Alfred North Whitehead, English mathematician, philosopher. (1861-1947)
“There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore looking like an idiot.”
Steven Wright, Comedian, actor, writer. (1955- )
“The vapour of the boiled fish arose like incense from the shrine of a barbarian idol.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne 'The House of Seven Gables' (1851)
"Fish and guests stink in three days."
Benjamin Franklin, ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
"In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
“....nothing can more effectually destroy the appetite, or disgrace the cook, than fish sent to table imperfectly cleaned. Handle it lightly, and never throw it roughly about, so as to bruise it.”
Eliza Acton, ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)
"Fish, to taste right, must swim three times -in water, in butter, and in wine."
Polish proverb
"Ruling a large kingdom, is like cooking a small fish."
(Handle gently and never overdo it)
Lao-tse, Chinese philosopher (6th century BC)
“....it is possible to exaggerate and to be duped by gastronomic nincompoops who write of gourmets with a sense of taste so refined that they can tell whether a fish was caught under or between the bridges, and distinguish by its superior flavor the thigh on which the partridge leans while asleep.”
Angelo Pellegrini, 'The Unprejudiced Palate' (1948)
“A countryman between 2 Lawyers, is like a fish between two cats.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
"There was an Old Man of Marseilles,
Whose daughters wore bottle-green veils;
They caught several fish, which they put in a dish,
And sent to their Pa' at Marseilles."
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; (1812-1888)
“....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 (A.D. 23-79)- (‘Choice Cuts’ by Mark Kurlansky)
“Fish in the hands of a skilled cook can become an inexhaustible source of gustatory pleasures.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) - ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
"Soup and fish explain half the emotions of human life."
Sydney Smith
"I'm in the mood for fish, but I don't want anything that tastes fishy."
anonymous restaurant customer
"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm."
William Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet’
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Gloria Steinem (?)
“Fish is meant to tempt as well as nourish, and everything that lives in water is seductive.”
Jean-Paul Aron
“Fish and guests in three days are stale.”
John Lyly, English author ‘Euphues’ (1554?-1606)
“Fish is held out to be one of the greatest luxuries of the table and not only necessary, but even indispensable at all dinners where there is any pretence of excellence or fashion.”
Isabella Beeton (1836-1865)
“Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat. Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough.”
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910)
“Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.”
P. J. O'Rourke (1947 - )
“At high tide the fish eat ants; at low tide the ants eat fish.”
Thai Proverb
“I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tunafish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock.”
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
“We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic.”
Bible, Numbers 11
“What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.”
Emile Zola, French writer (1840-1902)
“Fishing is pretty good.....We had only to throw a line in the water to catch forty or fifty fish of the kind called here barbue (catfish). There is none like it in France. Travelers and poor people live on it very comfortably, for it can be eaten, and is very good cooked in water without sauce.”
Father Dollier and Father Galinée, travelling with La Salle (1669-1670)
“Fish, to taste right, must swim three times -in water, in butter, and in wine.”
Polish proverb
"There was a Young Lady of Wales,
Who caught a large fish without scales;
When she lifted her hook, she exclaimed, 'Only look!'
That extatic Young Lady of Wales."
Edward Lear, English artist, writer; (1812-1888)
“Monkfish is called the poor man's lobster. As long as people never see what it looks like whole, they love it.”
Werner Auer, Executive chef, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Houston
“If I go down in for anything in history, I would like to be known as the person who convinced the American people that catfish is one of the finest eating fishes in the world.”
Willard Scott (The Today Show)
“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) ‘Hamlet’
“An egg of one hour old, bread of one day, a goat of one month, wine of six months, flesh of a year, fish of ten years and a wife of twenty years, a friend among a hundred, are the best of all number.”
John Wodroephe, English commentator. 'Spared Hours,' 1623
“Fish should smell like the ocean. If they smell like fish, it's too late.”
Unknown
“All sorrows are less with bread.”
Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish author. (1547-1616)
“I like reality that tastes like bread.”
Jean Anouilh (1910-1987)
“Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.”
Alan Coren, writer, humorist (1938-2007)
“Man does not live by bread alone, even presliced bread.”
D.W. Brogan
“Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog.”
Mr. & Mrs. Eugene Christian - 'Uncooked foods and How to Use Them' (1905)
“The early decay and death of our most promising American families unquestionably are due to almost universal use of new fermented bread.”
Shirley Dare, Los Angeles Times (1894)
“Meat! We are going to eat some meat; and what meat! Real game! Still no bread, though.”
Ned Land in Jules Verne's 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' (1870)
“The bread I eat in London, is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum, and bone ashes: insipid to the taste, and destructive to the constitution.”
Tobias Smollett, 'The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker' (1771)
“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?”
’Housekeeping In Old Virginia' Marion Cabell Tyree ed. (1878)
“Sometimes I pray to Cod for the veal-power to stop playing with my food words, but I fear it's too bread into me. For all I know, the wurst may be yet to come.
Mark Morton, 'Arts & Scantlings' (Gastronomica, Fall 2006)
“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, ‘The Young House-keeper’ (1846)
“Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread. Without it, it's flat.”
Carmen McRae, Jazz vocalist and pianist. (1920-1994)
“Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and often times the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”
‘A Book for A Cook’, The Pillsbury Co. (1905)
“Give me yesterday's Bread, this Day's Flesh, and last Year's Cyder.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
“Oh, God above, if heaven has a taste it must be an egg with butter and salt, and after the egg is there anything in the world lovlier than fresh warm bread and a mug of sweet golden tea?”
Frank McCourt, ‘Angela's Ashes’ (1996)
“In the social state to which we have come today, it is hard to imagine a nation which would live solely on bread and vegetables.”
Jean-Antheleme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) - ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
“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, American novelist (1896-1956)
“....do not, as you value the health and happiness of those who sit at your table, place before them hot leavened bread or biscuit.”
Sarah Josepha Hale, 'The Good Housekeeper' (1839)
“Among those kinds of food which the good housekeeper should scrupulously banish from her table, is that of hot leavened bread....I believe it more often lays the foundation of diseases of the stomach, than any other kind of nourishment, used among us.”
Sarah Josepha Hale, 'The Good Housekeeper' (1839)
“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter,the greatest of feasts.”
James Beard (1903-1985)
“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.”
Robert Browning (1812-1889) English poet
"How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?"
Julia Child
"If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second."
Edward Bellamy, American writer (1850-1898)
"The first time I ate organic whole-grain bread I swear it tasted like roofing material."
Robin Williams
"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
"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, French writer (1802-1870)
"Honest bread is very well - it's the butter that makes the temptation."
Douglas Jerrold (1803-1857)
"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, American poet (1830-1886)
"Of all smells, bread; of all tastes, salt."
George Herbert, English poet (1593-1633)
"The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight."
M. F. K. Fisher (1908-1992)
"O God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!"
Thomas Hood, British poet (1799-1845)
"Without bread all is misery."
William Cobbett, British journalist (1763?-1835)
"The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight..."
M. F. K. Fisher, ‘The Art of Eating’
"[Breadbaking is] 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, ‘The Art of Eating’
"Sesame seeds and Poppy seeds are the only officially acceptable "spots" that should be seen on the surface of any loaf of bread. Fuzzy and hairy looking white or green growth areas are a good indication that your bread has turned into a pharmaceutical laboratory experiment."
Unknown
"The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war."
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) ‘Sea and Sardinia’
"You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread."
Henry Miller, American writer (1891-1980)
"Bread deals with living things, with giving life, with growth, with the seed, the grain that nurtures. Its not coincidence that we say bread is the staff of life."
Lionel Poilne
"Bread is like dressed, hats and shoes -- in other words, essential!"
Emily Post
“There would have to be bread, some rich, whole-grain bread and zwieback, and perhaps on a long, narrow dish some pale Westphalian ham laced with strips of white fat like an evening sky with bands of clouds. There would be some tea ready to be drunk, yellowish golden tea in glasses with silver saucers, giving off a faint fragrance.”
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
“Who hath not met with home-made bread,
A heavy compound of putty and lead.”
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
“Acorns were good till bread was found.”
Francis Bacon, English philosopher, statesman (1561-1626)
“An egg of one hour old, bread of one day, a goat of one month, wine of six months, flesh of a year, fish of ten years and a wife of twenty years, a friend among a hundred, are the best of all number.”
John Wodroephe, English commentator. 'Spared Hours' 1623
“Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), 'The Seer'
“Without wishing in the slightest degree to disparage the skill and labour of breadmakers by trade, truth compels us to assert our conviction of the superior wholesomeness of bread made in our own homes.”
Eliza Acton, ‘Modern Cookery for Private Families’ (1845)
“Bouillabaisse, this golden soup, this incomparable golden soup which embodies and concentrates all the aromas of our shores and which permeates, like an ecstasy, the stomachs of astonished gastronomes. Bouillabaisse is one of those classic dishes whose glory has encircled the world, and the miracle consists of this: there are as many bouillabaisses as there are good chefs or cordon bleus. Each brings to his own version his special touch.”
Curnonsky (1872-1956)
“A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”
Willa Cather, 'Death Comes for the Archbishop' (1927)
“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, journalist
“Good manners: The noise you don't make when you're eating soup.”
Bennett Cerf, humorist, publisher (1898-1971)
“There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.”
Laurie Colwin, 'Home Cooking' (1988)
“To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.”
Laurie Colwin
"There was a Young Lady of Poole,
Whose soup was excessively cool;
So she put it to boil,by the aid of some oil,
That ingenious Young Lady of Poole."
Edward Lear, English artist, writer;(1812-1888)
“From time immemorial, soups and broths have been the worldwide medium for utilizing what we call the kitchen byproducts or as the French call them, the 'dessertes de la table' (leftovers), or 'les parties interieures de la bete', such as head, tail, lights, liver, knuckles and feet.”
Louis P. De Gouy, The Soup Book (1949)
“Good soup is one of the prime ingredients of good living. For soup can do more to lift the spirits and stimulate the appetite than any other one dish.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“One whiff of a savory aromatic soup and appetites come to attention. The steaming fragrance of a tempting soup is a prelude to the goodness to come. An inspired soup puts family and guests in a receptive mood for enjoying the rest of the menu.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“It is thought that potato water is unhealthy; and therefore do not boil potatoes in soup, but boil elsewhere, and add them when nearly cooked.”
Catharine E. Beecher - 'Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt-Book' (1846)
“Soup is cuisine's kindest course. It breathes reassurance; it steams consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability, as the five o'clock cup of tea or the cocktail hour.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“Soup is the song of the hearth... and the home.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“Soup is to the meal, what the hostesses smile of welcome is to the party. A prelude to the goodness to come.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“Soups challenge us, because an enticing flavorful stew can be as different from the thin watery beverage sometimes erroneously called soup as a genuine green turtle is from the mock turtle.”
Louis P. De Gouy, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“There is nothing like a plate or a bowl of hot soup, it's 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, ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
“This is not that, and that is certainly not this, and at the same time an oyster stew is not stewed, and although they are made of the same things and even cooked almost the same way, an oyster soup should never be called a stew, nor stew soup.”
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992)
“The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.”
Margaret Halsey (1910-1997) American author
"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 (Miss Manners)
"I live on good soup, not on fine words."
Moliere
"Only the pure of heart can make good soup"
Beethoven
"Soup must be eaten boiling hot and coffee drunk piping hot."
Grimod de La Reynière
"An old-fashioned vegetable soup, without any enhancement, is a more powerful anticarcinogen than any known medicine."
James Duke M.D.(U.S.D.A.)
"The word soupe, is French, but extremely bourgeois; it is well to serve potage and not soupe."
‘Dictionnaire de Trévoux’ (18th Century)
"Beautiful soup, so rich and green
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful soup!
Beautiful soup! Who cares for fish
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth of beautiful soup?"
Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice in Wonderland’
"It [soup] breathes reassurance, it offers consolation; after a weary day it promotes sociability...There is nothing like a bowl of hot soup, it's wisp of aromatic steam teasing the nostrils into quivering anticipation."
Louis P. DeGouy, Waldorf-Astoria chef), ‘The Soup Book’ (1949)
"Hot soup at table is very vulgar; it either leads to an unseemly mode of taking it, or keeps people waiting too long whilst it cools. Soup should be brought to table only moderately warm."
Charles Day, ‘Hints on Etiquette’ (1844)
"Soup and fish explain half the emotions of human life."
Sydney Smith
"It [soup] is to a dinner what a portico or a peristyle is to a building; that is to say, it is not only the first part of it, but it must be devised in such a manner as to set the tone of the whole banquet, in the same way as the overture of an opera announces the subject of the work."
Grimod de la Reynière
"Of all the items on the menu, soup is that which exacts the most delicate perfection and the strictest attention."
Auguste Escoffier
"Soup of the evening, beautiful..."
Lewis Carroll
"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting."
Abraham Maslow
"Between soup and love, the first is better."
old Spanish saying
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
H.L. Mencken
"I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience."
'Saki' (Hector Hugh Munro), Scottish writer (1870-1916)
"What an awful thing life is. It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless."
Gustave Flaubert
"Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day, and awakens and refines the appetite."
Auguste Escoffier
"First prepare the soup of your choice and pour it into a bowl. Then, take the bowl and quickly turn it upside down on the cookie tray. Lift the bowl and quickly turn it upside down on the cookie tray. Lift the bowl ever so gently so that the soup retains the shape of the bowl. Gently is the key word here. Then, with the knife cut the soup down the middle into halves, then quarters, and gently reassemble the soup into a cube. Some of the soup will run off onto the cookie tray. Lift this soup up by the corners and flod slowly into a cylindrical soup staff. Place the packet in your purse or inside coat pocket, and pack off to work."
Steve Martin
“And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.”
John Steinbeck, ‘East of Eden’
“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, American novelist (1896-1956)
“Crackers, toasted or hard bread may be added a short time before the soup is wanted; but do not put in those libels on civilized cookery, called DUMPLINGS! One might about as well eat, with the hope of digesting, a brick from the ruins of Babylon, as one of the hard, heavy masses of boiled dough which usually pass under this name.”
Sarah Josepha Hale, 'The Good Housekeeper' (1839)
“Never commit yourself to a cheese without having first examined it.”
T.S. Eliot
“What is a harp but an oversized cheese slicer with cultural pretensions?”
Denis Norden, English comedy writer.
“Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.”
Luis Buñuel (1900-1983)
“Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself.”
Jerome K. Jerome, 'Three Men in a Boat' (1889)
“Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards.”
Jerome K. Jerome, 'Three Men in a Boat' (1889)
“The king's cheese is half wasted in parings; but no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“You Banbury cheese!”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)- 'The Merry Wives of Windsor'
“Cheese has always been a food that both sophisticated and simple humans love.”
M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf (1942)
“Claret, dear, not Coca-Cola, When you're having Gorgonzola....”
William Cole, 'What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!'
“What a friend we have in cheeses!
For no food more subtly pleases,
Nor plays so grand a gastronomic part;
Cheese imported - not domestic -
For we all get indigestic
From all the pasteurizer's Kraft and sodden art.”
William Cole, 'What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!'
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
“New York is a gothic Roquefort. San Francisco reminds me of a romanesque Camembert.”
Salvador Dali(1904-1989)
“I think I'm liquefying like an old Camembert.”
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
“People who know nothing about cheeses reel away from Camembert.”
Harvey Day
“Opie, you haven't finished your milk. We can't put it back in the cow, you know.”
Aunt Bee 'The Andy Griffith Show'
“In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.”
Rita Rudner (Comedian)
“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.”
James Joyce, Irish writer (1882-1941)
“Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?”
Billy Connolly, comedian.
"Milk is valued for giving a part of its whiteness to the skin of women. Poppea, wife of Domitius Nero, took 500 nursing asses everywhere in her traveling party, and soaked herself completely in a bath of this milk, in the belief that it would make her skin more supple."
Pliny
"I don't believe you have to be a cow to know what milk is."
Ann Landers
"The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other milk."
Ogden Nash
"Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer."
Arnold Schwarzenegger (1975)
“Sam's Religion is like a Cheddar Cheese, 'tis made of the milk of one & twenty parishes.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
“There was a fish flavor to the milk....which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.”
Herman Melville, ‘Moby Dick’ (1851)
"Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?"
Job, speaking to God
"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
“The king's cheese is half wasted in parings; but no matter, 'tis made of the people's milk.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“Wine is the drink of the gods, milk the drink of babes, tea the drink of women, and water the drink of beasts."
John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895)
“Coffee in England is just toasted milk.”
Christopher Fry
“We heard one evening, under the eye of the imperturbable Paul, a foreign lady ask for a milk chocolate drink to accompany a fillet of sole Cubat, the chefs speciality. Sacrilege! Just as well that Marcel Proust and Boni de Castellane were not here to see that.”
Simon Arbellot de Vacqueur (1897-1965) - French journalist
“Physicians say that coffee without cream is more wholesome, particularly for persons of weak digestion. There seems to be some element in the coffee which combined with the milk, forms a leathery coating on the stomach, and impairs digestion.”
‘The Buckeye Cookbook’ (1883)
“The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk."
W.H. Auden, ‘Age of Anxiety’ (1947)
“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
“Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.”
Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), 'The Seer'
"They sow no crops but live on livestock and fish, which they get in abundance from the river Araxes; moreover, they are drinkers of milk."
Herodotus, (5th century B.C.) Greek historian, referring to the peoples of the Caucasus
“Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.”
Fran Lebowitz, journalist
"What I like to drink most is wine that belongs to others."
Diogenes , 320 BC, Greek philosopher
“Take heed of the Vinegar of sweet Wine, and the Anger of Good-nature.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
“O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou has no name to be known by, let us call thee devil....O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 'Othello'
"A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, ‘The Physiology of Taste’ (1825)
“Bless the products of the bovines and the vines!”
William Cole, 'What a Friend We Have in Cheeses!'
"To claim that wines should not be changed is a heresy; the palate becomes saturated and after the third glass the best of wines arouses nothing but an obscure sensation."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826) - ‘The Physiology of Taste’
“Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“When Wine enters, out goes the Truth.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) ‘Poor Richard's Almanac’
"Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good."
Samuel Johnson (1778) Boswell's ‘Life of Johnson’
"Why beer is better than wine: "....human feet are conspicuously absent from beer making."
Steve Mirsky, ‘Scientific American’ (May, 2007)
“Never spare the Parson's wine, nor the Baker's pudding.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)’ Poor Richard's Almanac’
"Wine makes a symphony of a good meal."
Fernande Garvin, ‘The Art of French Cooking’
"Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Benjamin Franklin
"Between each wine and each dish one should drink a mouthful of pure fresh water, preferably not (or only slightly) aerated."
Paul Ramain (1895-1966), French doctor.
"The road to great wine is littered with beer bottles"
Unknown
“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”
Ernest Hemingway, 'Death in the Afternoon'
"An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode."
Ambrose Bierce, American writer (1842-1914)
"The vine bears three kinds of grapes: the first of pleasure, the second of intoxication, the third of disgust."
Anacharsis, Scythian philosopher (6th century B.C.)
"Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"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 (1706-1790)
"Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water."
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
"For a gourmet wine is not a drink but a condiment, provided that your host has chosen correctly."
Edouard De Pomaine, French author
"The dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink."
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
"Wine is sunlight, held together by water."
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"Wine is grape juice. Every drop of liquid filling so many bottles has been drawn out of the ground by the roots of the vine."
Hugh Johnson, wine book author
"Wine is the pleasantest subject in the world to discuss. All its associations are with occasions when people are at their best; with relaxation, contentment, leisurely meals and the free flow of ideas."
Hugh Johnson, wine book author
"How I like claret!...It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down to cool and feverless; then, you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver. No; 'tis rather a peace-maker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal part mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments, like a bully looking for his trull, and hurrying from door to door, bouncing against the wainscott, but rather walks like Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so gently that you do not feel his step."
John Keats (1795-1821)
"This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk."
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
"'Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone. Alice looked around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. 'I don't see any wine,' she remarked. 'There isn't any,' said the March Hare."
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-1898)
"Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages."
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
"Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating."
Norman Douglas, English writer (1868-1952)
"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, English writer, lexicographer, critic and conversationalist (1709-1784)
"A glass of good wine is a gracious creature, and reconciles poor mortality to itself, and that is what few things can do."
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
"Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
"The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest."
William Blake (1757-1827)
“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 (1842-1914) 'The Devil's Dictionary' (1911)
“To make white wine out of red wine. Put bean-meal or three egg whites into the flask and stir for a very long time. The next day the wine will be white. The ashes of white grape vines have the same effect.”
Apicius
“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, 'The Deipnosophists' (c. A.D. 200)
“We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.
”Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”
Bible, Proverbs 31:6-7
“In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.”
Ernest Hemingway
“What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infininite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"
Isak Dineson, Danish author (1885-1962)
“French wines may be said but to pickle meat in the stomach, but this is the wine that digests, and doth not only breed good blood, but it nutrifieth also, being a glutinous substantial liquor; of this wine, if of any other, may be verified that merry induction: That good wine makes good blood, good blood causeth good humors, good humors cause good thoughts, good thoughts bring forth good works, good works carry a man to heaven, ergo, good wine carrieth a man to heaven.”
James Howell (1594-1666)
“Wine is the drink of the gods, milk the drink of babes, tea the drink of women, and water the drink of beasts."
John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895)
“Wine is a living liquid containing no preservatives. Its life cycle comprises youth, maturity, old age, and death. When not treated with reasonable respect it will sicken and die."
Julia Child (1912-2004)
“’Tis pity wine should be so deleterious,
For tea and coffee leave us much more serious.”
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence"
Robert Fripp, guitarist and cofounder of the band King Crimson (1969)
“Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.”
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)Boswell's "Life of Johnson"
“I think it is a great error to consider a heavy tax on wines as a tax on luxury. On the contrary, it is a tax on the health of our citizens.”
Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of U.S.)
“No nation is drunken where wine is cheap, and none sober where the dearness of wine substitutes ardent spirits as the common beverage"
Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of U.S.)
“To buy very good wine nowadays requires only money. To serve it to your guests is a sign of fatigue.”
William F. Buckley in ‘Harpers Bazaar’ (September, 1979)
“Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.”
William Shakespeare
“In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria.”
David Auerbach
“If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?”
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet
“Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness, but the abuse of drink is from Satan, the wine is from God, but the Drunkard is from the Devil.”
Increase Mather (1639-1723), Boston minister and educator
“Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.”
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
“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 (1879-1935)
“Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at, and I sigh.”
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish dramatist, poet.
“When you ask one friend to dine,
Give him you best wine!
When you ask two,
The second best will do!”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet (1807-1882)
“Wine is earth's answer to the sun.”
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
“If wine tells truth -- and so have said the wise,
It makes me laugh to think how brandy lies!”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-94) U.S. writer, physician
“In vino veritas.” (In wine there is truth.)
Pliny, Roman naturalist (A.D. 23-79)
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
“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 (1947 - )
“Wine is the intellectual part of a meal while meat is the material.”
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
“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 (1877-1970)
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 (1949) 'With a Jug of Wine'
"I cook with wine... sometimes I even put it in food."
Unknown
"The stomach heaves when one receives from a valet a goblet bearing the greasy imprint of his sauce-stained fingers, and when one sees at the bottom the filthy dregs collected there."
Horace (Roman poet) (8 B.C.)
“Some people wanted champagne and caviar when they should have had beer and hot dogs.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
“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 caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.”
“Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.”
Graham Greene, author, playwright (1904-1991)
“The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days.”
Clement Attlee, British politician (1883-1967)
"Champagne has the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife."
Aldous Huxley, British writer (1894-1963)
"There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne."
Bette Davis in ‘Old Acquaintance’
"Burgundy makes you think of silly things; Bordeaux makes you talk about them, and Champagne makes you do them."
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
"Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!"
Dom Perignon, at the moment he discovered champagne
“We lived very simply - but with all the essentials of life well understood and provided for - hot baths, cold champagne, new peas and old brandy.”
Winston Churchil- 'The Last Lion' by William Manchester (1993)
"I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller."
George Bernard Shaw
"Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She couldtake 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, American dancer (1878-1927)
"Champagne's funny stuff. I'm used to whiskey. Whiskey is a slap on the back, and champagne's a heavy mist before my eyes."
Jimmy Stewart, ‘The Philadelphia Story’
"Champagne and orange juice is a great drink. The orange improves the champagne. The champagne definitely improves the orange."
Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
“In victory, you deserve Champagne, in defeat, you need it.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
“My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne”
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
“Gentlemen, in the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of Champagne.”
Paul Claudel, French writer (1868-1955)
“A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced, the imagination is agreeably stirred; the wits become more nimble. A bottle produces the contrary effect. Excess causes a comatose insensibility. So it is with war: and the quality of both is best discovered by sipping.”
Winston Churchill (1871-1947) ‘The Wit of Sir Winston’ (1965)
“Champagne does have one regular drawback: swilled as a regular thing a certain sourness settles in the tummy, and the result is permanent bad breath. Really incurable.”
Truman Capote, 'Answered Prayers' (1975)
“No government could survive without champagne. Champagne in the throats of our diplomatic people is like oil in the wheels of an engine.”
Joseph Dargent, French Vintner (1955)
See Also : The Book Lover's Cookbook
By James T. Ehler available in http://www.foodreference.com/html/quotes.html. Compilatiton adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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