Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.

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.

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.

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.

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures.

Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.