It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.
since we must eat to live, we might as well do it with both grace and gusto.
The smell of good bread baking,
like the sound of lightly flowing water,
is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight
No yoga exercise, no meditation in a chapel filled with music will rid you of your blues better than the humble task of making your own bread.
Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.
I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.
Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.
Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.
If time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.
Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they’ve lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat – and drink! – with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.
Too few of us, perhaps, feel that breaking of bread, the sharing of salt, the common dipping into one bowl, mean more than satisfaction of a need. We make such primal things as casual as tunes heard over a radio, forgetting the mystery and strength in both.
[Bachelors’] approach to gastronomy is basically sexual, since few of them under seventy-nine will bother to produce a good meal unless it is for a pretty woman.
A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet.
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and it is all one.
One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.
I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.
I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment.
gastronomy is and always has been connected with its sister art of love.
Almost every person has something secret he likes to eat.
A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.
All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are rich or poor.
I think that when two people are able to weave that kind of invisible thread of understanding and sympathy between each other, that delicate web, they should not risk tearing it. It is too rare, and it lasts too short a time at best.
It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it
Having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat.
