Cookbook Quotes

There are some things that don't change much. I find the smell of a dish, or the way a certain spice is crushed, or just a quick look at the way something has been put on a plate, can pull me back to another place and time. I love those memories that seem so far away, yet you can hold them and carry them with you, even forget them, and then, with a single taste or hint or a smell, be chaperoned back to a beautiful moment. ~ Tessa Kiros

Saying the Bible is not a book about science is like saying a cookbook is not a book about chemistry. ~ Robert J. Marks II

It used to be that people went to their doctor to find out what was wrong. That was the expectation when someone made an appointment with their local family doctor: they wanted to know what they had and how they could feel better. Ear infection: what should I take? Pulled muscle: what should I do? Broken ankle: how can you fix it? Over the years, something happened to this common sense approach. "Algorithms" and "pathways" have proliferated in ways that have reduced each person's unique story to simplistic recipes. More often than not, this cookbook approach ends up telling patients what they don't have - which, while potentially reassuring, does not result in a real diagnosis.1 ~ Leana Wen

I think if you can take one or two things from a cookbook, it's successful. ~ Thomas Keller

Food is an implement of magic, and only the most coldhearted rationalist could squeeze the juices of life out of it and make it bland. In a true sense, a cookbook is the best source of psychological advice and the kitchen the first choice of room for a therapy of the world. ~ Thomas More

Here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you're mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn't put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty - n ~ Matthew Olzmann

I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show. ~ Christopher Walken

The popular Paderno Spiralizer, Veggetti Spiral Vegetable Cutter and other spiralizers and julienne slicers are perfect for food lovers on any kind of regimen, including Gluten-Free, Paleo or weight-loss diets. This book will not only give you great recipes to utilize your new vegetable cutter, but it will show you how to use these utensils safely and efficiently. ~ J.S. Amie

I will not allow a Delia Smith cookbook in my house! It's all so precise with Delia, and it makes cooking seem so inaccessible. ~ Theresa May

If you're chained to a computer all day, you're not using up much energy, even if you drag yourself to the gym a couple of days a week. And to make matters worse for me, I've had a secondary career right along with my romance writing - cookbook author, under my real name, Ruth Glick. ~ Ruth Glick

She is my "Soul Dog" and I totally get it now. ~ Christy Bright

The writer's creed: If life hands you lemons--write The Lemon Cookbook! ~ Sharon Geltner

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble. ~ Ellen Feldman

Nothing belongs to you. It didn't matter that Grandma gave the cookbook to me. All Mama had to do was hold it in her hands and it was hers. ~ Bryn Greenwood

Recipes are important but only to a point. What's more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that. ~ Michael Symon

I met Charlie Trotter before I actually saw him in person; I was 24 when I first opened the pages of Charlie's cookbook 'Charlie Trotter's' and was greeted by a man I would know and admire for the next 20 years. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

I enjoyed the side bars with fun facts and notable sources for where to get more help. Merrin's such a fun writer; I'd love to see her invite kids into her kitchen for cooking classes. She'd be perfect in the classroom and would entice children to try new foods. It's the adults that might need fooling. ~ Cindy Gay

A cookbook must have recipes, but it shouldn't be a blueprint. It should be more inspirational; it should be a guide. ~ Thomas Keller

I love this book! There are very few cookbooks published today that add something truly new and distinctive to the literature of food and cooking. Jennifer McLagan's Fat is a smart, thoughtful book that ultimately asks us to understand our food better. ~ Michael Ruhlman

My passion for writing cookbooks really came from my love of collecting cookbooks. ~ Wolfgang Puck

I hope this book will inspire the kitchen con-artist in you, increase fruit and veggie consumption in your family, and motivate you to become an Accidental Cook. Pass it on! ~ Merrin McGregor

I've always had a fantasy to write a cookbook, because everyone wants to know what a model eats. ~ Padma Lakshmi

I'd like to learn how to cook. I've hauled around this big, old, heavy Martha Stewart cookbook in my suitcase to Cape Cod, L.A., Paris. I don't know what possessed me. ~ Mamie Gummer

Chekyns upon soppes" (basically chicken on cinnamon toast) from the 1545 early Tudor cookbook A Propre Newe Booke of Cokerye: Chekyns upon soppes. Take sorel sauce a good quantitie and put in Sinamon and suger and lette it boyle and poure it upon the soppes then laie on the chekyns. ~ Dan Jurafsky

It is important to view a recipe book as one that you use daily and what we in our family call "a living book" - a book that you use all the time, not just read once and discard on the shelf. It is in a sense a spell book, a book of magical enchantments, to be consulted, used and altered as needed. ~ The Silver Elves

A cookbook is a moment in time because, otherwise, you look back at the end of the day, and all the meals have been eaten, and the experience is gone. ~ Daniel Humm

I am a cookbook fanatic. ~ Samantha Bee

My first bestseller was a cookbook. That will make any novelist humble. ~ Dan Alatorre

Take what fame or fortune comes your way. My first bestseller was a cookbook, so remember to be open to trying new things. From that experience I learned things about marketing a book that benefitted me greatly and, combined with my sales management experience with Fortune 500 companies, I was able to launch a string of bestsellers. ~ Dan Alatorre

The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers – amateurs – it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral – it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur – the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness is a sin and boredom a heresy – is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man who is bound, by his love, to speak. If he loves Wisdom or the Arts, so much the better for him and for all of us. But if he loves only the way meat browns or onions peel, if he delights simply in the curds of his cheese or the color of his wine, he is, by every one of those enthusiasms, commanded to speak. A silent lover is one who doesn't know his job. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

For me, whether it's in a book or on T.V., a recipe has to be simple. I have a short attention span, so to open a cookbook and see a recipe that goes on for three to four pages, well, I've lost interest. ~ Al Roker

There was an extensive collection of cookbooks in the well-stocked library, and he took to pouring over these in the evenings. ~ Alexandra Adornetto

History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

You want happy endings, read cookbooks. ~ Dean Young

I have loved to cook since I was a child in my mother's kitchen. If I don't have time to cook, I'll just read a cookbook. ~ Kamala Harris

I had this idea that I would write a companion cookbook to 'Barbara the Slut.' The recipes would be like, 'Put the Lucky Charms in the bowl.' ~ Lauren Holmes

Seriously, why do you read that crap?" asked the girl.
Book Boy snapped his volume shut and removed his glasses from his nose. "I speak the truth! In all of these books the girls are throwing themselves at the romantic heroes- romantic heroes who are dead, ho drink human blood. Be of good cheer, my brothers, for I tell you there is hope!"
One of the other guys, a large black chap, rolled his lone eye. "Okay, you're cut off. Someone get him a cookbook or something."
"Or, you know, some fair damsel to seduce," the girl said, looking up from her reflection. ~ Lia Habel

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history. ~ Russell Baker

Collecting cookbooks is still my biggest passion! Believe it or not, I actually got the biggest form of inspiration from my kids. My kids do everything online. They would have their tablets in front of them watching hours upon hours of online videos. I came to understand that these videos were actually teaching my kids lots of different forms of information. ~ Wolfgang Puck

The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight. ~ Jerry Falwell

A cookbook is only as good as its poorest recipe. ~ Julia Child

Collectively the media; the meat, oil, and dairy industries; most prominent chefs and cookbook authors; and our own government are not presenting accurate advice about the healthiest way to eat. ~ Caldwell Esselstyn

I buy a lot of cookbooks. Some of them you just kind of read, and you try one recipe, and it doesn't really work. So then you don't go back to it. The new Ina Garten cookbook, which is called 'Back to Basics,' I have not had a failure with. It is the most fantastic cookbook. I think I bought 20 copies of it for friends. ~ Nora Ephron

The Pigtronix Envelope Phaser pedal is a definite 'must have' for your Funk recipe cookbook ... it adds definite Funkaliciousness to your WOO stew. ~ Bernie Worrell

Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don't go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won't find it and you'll bugger up your soufflé. ~ Tim Minchin

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

My mom had Julia Child and 'The Fannie Farmer Cookbook' on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes. ~ Anthony Bourdain

Oh, did I tell you I have a cookbook? I have a cookbook deal. ~ Ted Allen

History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen. ~ Charles Simic

Megan was able to get me the single most important item in this entire house."
"She got you that new vibrator?"
"Jesus ... "
"Oh, the cookbook, right," he said, remembering.
Megan used to work for the Food Network, and was able to secure me a signed copy of the original Barefoot Contessa cookbook. ~ Alice Clayton

As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing. ~ Alice B. Toklas

Eternity is a ham and two people" (also given as "Eternity is two people and a ham") is an old quip from the days when a ham was huge - far more than two people could finish. Irma Rombauer mentions this line in her famous cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. ~ Dorothy Parker

When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.' ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Whether you're reaching for one of your favorite cookbooks or just winging it, do your best to keep a well-stocked arsenal of healthy ingredients at your disposal. At the very least, you'll always be ready to whip up a green juice or smoothie. ~ Kris Carr

Somewhere close behind air and water is the need for food. ~ L.J. Martin

(About a cookbook ... )
- What about this one? Maids of Honor?
- Weeelll, they starts OUT as Maids of Honor ... but they ends up Tarts. ~ Terry Pratchett

All soul food is southern food, but not all southern food is soul food. ~ Cassandra Harrell

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people. ~ Maya Angelou

When I wrote my cookbook, 'I Love Crab Cakes,' I asked some of my best chef buddies to contribute recipes. ~ Tom Douglas

Cookbooks bear the same relation to real books that microwave food bears to your grandmother?s. ~ Andrei Codrescu

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 and Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies - loaf givers. ~ John Ruskin

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities. ~ Crescent Dragonwagon

We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Once you understand the foundations of cooking - whatever kind you like, whether it's French or Italian or Japanese - you really don't need a cookbook anymore. ~ Thomas Keller

... with San Mateo food writer Merrin McGregor's irresistible recipe, you can have your French Toast -- and eat it, too. It's a glorious fruit salad with little cubes of orange-tinged French toast ... We just added a tiny maple drizzle when we served it, and felt sated and virtuous at the same time. ~ Jackie Burrell

Cookbooks, it should be stressed, do not belong in the kitchen at all. We keep them there for the sake of appearances; occasionally, we smear their pages together with vibrant green glazes or crimson compotes, in order to delude ourselves, and any passing browsers, that we are practicing cooks; but in all honesty, a cookbook is something you read in the living room, or in the bathroom, or in bed. ~ Anthony Lane

I let the food speak for itself and the food always wins... ~ Rachel Lynn Frank

There was no doubt in the minds of nineteenth-century cooks and cookbook writers that there was something about pie - a difficult to grasp something that made it universally esteemed in a way that cake or stew or soup was not. ~ Janet Clarkson

I intend that my last work shall be a cookbook composed of memories and desires.
Alexander Dumas, 1869, as quoted in Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days by James and Kay Salter ~ Alexandre Dumas

It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything. ~ Maya Angelou

The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant. ~ Mario Batali

It's funny, the whole cooking thing came out of just a random thought of writing a cookbook with my mom and my sister for fun ... ~ Trisha Yearwood

There's just so much love that goes into home cooking, and I think it will really help the American family overall. I'm hoping to maybe get a cookbook out one day because I've got some great family recipes. ~ Ming-Na Wen

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life. ~ Mark Miller

The Silver Spoon, the best-selling Italian cookbook of the last 50 years. ~ Timothy Ferriss

I haven't been thinking at all, not really, I've just been following the steps. The recipe.
& this is like turning a page in the cookbook & finding the next one blank. ~ Stephen King

I enjoy cooking and baking. Alicia Silverstone's vegan cookbook is awesome. ~ Mary-Louise Parker

A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing. ~ Grant Achatz

I would definitely be interested in doing a cooking show or something related to cooking, and I think probably most immediately, I would do a cookbook. ~ Keshia Knight Pulliam

My most cherished possessions are my grandma's letters and my vintage Martha Washington cookbook. ~ Sandra Lee

Healing Magic I instill,
Far Greater this,
Than any pill! ~ The Silver Elves

It wasn't fair, he thought. The world of pro sports was stuck in a time warp, still in the 1950s as far as sexuality went, even as the rest of the country, save for small pockets of deliberately cultivated ignorance, moved on, got over it. What kind of life are we going to have? Brian thought. Then he laughed at the thought of himself as a football wife, hanging out with the other wives and working on a charity cookbook. "What? ~ Brad Vance

The cookbook gives a detailed description of ingredients and procedures but no proofs for its prescriptions or reasons for its recipes; the proof of the pudding is in the eating ... Mathematics cannot be tested in exactly the same manner as a pudding; if all sorts of reasoning are debarred, a course of calculus may easily become an incoherent inventory of indigestible information. ~ George Polya

How can you say anything other than Ratatouille is Pixar's best movie? Your a chef, for Christ's sake," Sue said.
Lou smiled at Sue's accusatory tone. She needed this distraction.
Harley rolled his eyes and said, "You're letting your biases show, Sue. Up uses music better- like a character. The opening fifteen minutes is some of the best filmmaking- ever. And who doesn't love a good squirrel joke?"
"But Ratatouille brings it all back to food." Sue waved a carrot in the air to emphasize her point. "They made you want to eat food cooked by a rat! I'd eat the food; it looked magnificent. That rat cooked what he loved; what tasted good. Like I've been telling Lou, we should cook food from the heart, not just the cookbook. ~ Amy E. Reichert

I pictured a section of the ladies' auxiliary cookbook for Sudden Death Quick Snacks ... Using ingredients one could keep on the pantry shelf in the event of tragedy. ~ Sue Grafton

I've read hundreds of cookbooks. For my money, they are the bird. ~ Colonel Sanders

I've seen cookbooks from lots of great chefs that have been disappointing. A book, to me, it has to have a story. Some of these people, they open a restaurant, and one year later, there's a cookbook. There's not much of a story yet. ~ Wylie Dufresne

There's an old joke about a man who buys a cookbook for his wife and a negligee for his mistress. Somehow, though, the two parcels get mixed up and he fears that all will be lost. But on the contrary both women are delighted: the wife thrilled to be viewed in a sexual manner after years of domestic tedium, the mistress overjoyed that her lover considers her as more than just a body. I imagined the scenario as I trudged my way through Myer and David Jones. Should I look for lingerie for Cress, reassure her that despite all the hiccups of the past few months I still loved and wanted her? I thought I did, but a leopard-print G-string didn't seem the right way to express that. ~ Kylie Ladd

My youngest son becomes an award-winning nature photographer, and I cannot resist writing poems to his pictures. My daughter loves to cook, though I do not. Yet together, we write a cookbook with fairy tales. And now a second. ~ Jane Yolen

Then put in the interior a roasted goose and into its belly a roasted hen and in the belly of the hen a roasted pigeon and in the belly of the pigeon a roasted starling and in the belly of this a small bird, roasted or fried. ~ Candida Martinelli

Writers need to be open to trying new things. My first bestseller was a cookbook, and from that experience I learned things about marketing a book that benefitted me greatly. ~ Dan Alatorre

And dear, if you should someday become famous, don't write a cookbook. ~ Lauren Graham

Despite the complexity and variety of the universe, it turns out that to make one you need just three ingredients. Let's imagine that we could list them in some kind of cosmic cookbook. So what are the three ingredients we need to cook up a universe? The first is matter - stuff that has mass. Matter is all around us, in the ground beneath our feet and out in space. Dust, rock, ice, liquids. Vast clouds of gas, massive spirals of stars, each containing billions of suns, stretching away for incredible distances.
The second thing you need is energy. Even if you've never thought about it, we all know what energy is. Something we encounter every day. Look up at the Sun and you can feel it on your face: energy produced by a star ninety-three million miles away. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.
So we have matter and we have energy. The third thing we need to build a universe is space. Lots of space. You can call the universe many things - awesome, beautiful, violent - but one thing you can't call it is cramped. Wherever we look we see space, more space and even more space. Stretching in all directions. It's enough to make your head spin. So where could all this matter, energy and space come from? We had no idea until the twentieth century.
The answer came from the insights of one man, probably the most remarkable scientist who has ever lived. His name was Albert Einstein. Sadly I never got to meet h ~ Stephen Hawking

I love old cookbooks. I just got such a kick out of them, how the color would be way off or fake looking. The cook books now look so much like magazines, you'll never make food that looks like that. I'd rather see it the ugly way than they way they do it now. ~ Amy Sedaris

So Artichoke was a restaurant borne out of impulse and recklessness. Four years on, it's also a testament to how an enterprise started on such a fucked up approach can actually succeed. ~ Bjorn Shen

Americans, more than any other culture on earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family's cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of 'Fannie Farmer' or 'The Joy of Cooking'. ~ John Thorne

When we were working on 'Julie & Julia,' I went back to the Julia Child cookbook and made some things I haven't made in a while, one being beef bourguignon, which to me is a hilariously 1960s dish that everyone felt they had to serve at a dinner party or they weren't a grown-up. ~ Nora Ephron

When I purchased my first vegetable spiralizer, I was excited to try making zucchini noodles, also known as "zoodles." My first dish - zucchini spaghetti with fresh tomatoes, basil and garlic - was fun, creative, and delicious! I quickly found that zoodles were popular with my friends and family. Everyone seemed pleasantly surprised by the experience and enthusiastically asked for more! ~ J.S. Amie

I'm working on a second cookbook and am working on my love story, 'Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.' ~ Ree Drummond

Like most people who love to cook, I like the tangible things...but what I like even more are the intangible things: the familiar voices that fall out of the folds of an old cookbook, or the scenes that replay like a film reel across my kitchen wall. When we fall in love with a certain dish, I think that's what we're often responding to: that something else behind the fork or the spoon, the familiar story that food tells. ~ Molly Wizenberg