cooking
If Emily Dickinson owned a restaurant it would be Chez Panisse.
Eating: A Memoir (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 132.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I cooked the peaches as you told me, and they swelled to beautiful fleshy halves and tasted quite magic.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 471.
I have half a notion to learn to make bread myself: I imagine it’s no harder than mixing a good Martini, and I might come to enjoy the work.
“Fro-Joy,” in One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 137.
Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.
Pale Fire: A Novel (New York: Vintage, 1989), 21 (foreword).
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.
“Dinner Parties,” in Home Cooking (New York: HarperPerennial, 2000) [reissued edition], 95.
Every woman should kiss her butcher.
“Food: Everyone’s in the Kitchen,” Time, November 25, 1966.
The idea was to take French cooking out of cuckoo land and bring it down to where everybody is. You can’t turn a sow’s ear into veal Orloff, but you can do something very good with a sow’s ear.
“Food: Everyone’s in the Kitchen,” Time, November 25, 1966.