Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music.

The shellfish thing is very scary. You have to know the people you buy from and exactly where their wholesalers are getting the fish from.

Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again

People who are not interested in food always seem rather dry and unloving and don't have a real gusto for life.

I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.

We should enjoy food and have fun. It is one of the simplest and nicest pleasures in life.

I was kind of an innocent hayseed from a middle-class, utterly nonintellectual background.