Cooking is one failure after another, and that's how you finally learn.

People liked to eat veal until they saw pictures of these darling little animals with brown eyes. Veal calves been raised the same way for centuries.

Of course I made many boo-boos. At first this broke my heart, but then I came to understand that learning how to fix one's mistakes, or live with them, was an important part of becoming a cook.

Food, like the people who eat it, can be stimulated by wine or spirits. And, as with people, it can also be spoiled.

I was never a spy. I was with the OSS organization. We had a number of women, but we were all office help.

Romance is the icing but love is the cake.

In France cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking's sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don't know the basics, you turn out slop.