The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

A person cooking is a person giving. Even the simplest food is a gift.

I come from a coffee-loving family, and you can always tell when my sister and I have been around, because both of us collect all the dead coffee from everyone's morning cup, pour it over ice, and drink it. This is a disgusting habit.

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato.

When life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is not four perfect courses, each in a lovely pool of sauce whose ambrosial flavors are like nothing ever before tasted, but rather something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion - something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe.

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.