Hands are our earliest tools. Cooking starts with the hands which are so sensitive that when they touch something they transmit messages to your brain about texture and temperature.

There is absolutely no substitute for the best. Good food cannot be made of inferior ingredients masked with high flavor. It is true thrift to use the best ingredients available and to waste nothing.

What comforted me? That is easy. It was a strong cold chicken jelly so very, very thick. My mother's Chinese cook would fix it. He would cook it down, condense it-this broth with all sorts of feet in it, then it would gell into sheer bliss. It kept me alive once for three weeks when I was ill as a child. And I've always craved it since.

Good bread and good butter go together. They are one of the perfect marriages in gastronomy, and they never fail to cheer me.

I am so happy to see more and more people in this country are becoming addicted to cheese.

If I had to narrow my choice of meats down to one for the rest of my life, I am quite certain that meat would be pork.

Goodness, how much there is to learn about food!