It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books . . . finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams . . . .

A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.

Sharing our meals should be a joyful and a trustful act, rather than the cursory fulfillment of our social obligations.

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist

When a man is small, he loves and hates food with a ferocity which soon dims. At six years old his very bowels will heave when such a dish as creamed carrots or cold tapioca appear before him.

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to bursting point on anything from quail financiere to flapjacks, for no other reason than the beastlike satisfaction of his belly.