cooking

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“You know, it’s funny. By the time we develop real taste in food, and begin to learn how to prepare it, digestive disorders set in and weight piles up. When I think what I could have done in my youth, when I ate like a horse with no bad results at all, with the knowledge I’m getting now, I could cry.”

Avis DeVoto

more info

source: February 27, 1954 letter to Julia Child in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 164.

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category: aging, cooking, food

medium: letter

“I have always thought it was insane to expect a great big enormous turkey to take all those long extra hours. At some point there is a point of no return, if you know what I mean which I do not myself, but there must be some law that covers it. It has been my experience that all given cooking times for turkey are too long—the best is always done before you plan it.”

Avis DeVoto

more info

source: January 17, 1958 letter to Julia Child in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 309.

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category: cooking, food, turkey

medium: letter

“Thanks again for the knife, which is a little gem. My husband, I regret to say, has snitched it for his own use—cutting the lemon peel the proper thinness for the six o’clock Martini—but it will be mine while he is in California.”

Avis DeVoto

more info

source: April 3, 1952 letter to Julia Child in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 9–10.

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category: cooking, knife, lemon, martini, tool

medium: letter

“I cooked the peaches as you told me, and they swelled to beautiful fleshy halves and tasted quite magic.”

Emily Dickinson

more info

source: The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 471.

category: cooking, food, peach, recipe, taste

medium: letter

notes: letter to Louisa Norcross (addressed Louise in the letter), Dickinson's first cousin, May 1870?; more info about her here

“It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.”