Cookbooks hit you where you live. You want comfort; you want security; you want food; you want to not be hungry and not only do you want those basic things fixed, you want it done in a really nice, gentle way that makes you feel loved. That's a big desire, and cookbooks say to the person reading them, 'If you will read me, you will be able to do this for yourself and for others. You will make everybody feel better.'

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

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.

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.

Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home.

The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people.

That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional.