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

You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces - just good food from fresh ingredients.

Romance is the icing but love is the cake.

I found that the recipes in most - in all - the books I had were really not adequate. They didn't tell you enough... I won't do anything unless I'm told why I'm doing it. So I felt that we needed fuller explanations so that if you followed one of those recipes, it should turn out exactly right.

In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

Too much trouble,' 'Too expensive,' or 'Who will know the difference' are death knells for good food. ... Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes.

You never forget a beautiful thing that you have made. Even after you eat it, it stays with you - always.