I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.

Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.

There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.

People who like to cook like to talk about food....without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

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.

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.

I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.