In most recipes there are encouragingly few pitfalls. One mustn’t go berserk with the thought, but a quarter cup of liquid, a tablespoon more or less of butter, five minutes or so of cooking time are all variable and the sooner the beginning cook learns it the better the food will be.–Craig Claiborne
Craig Claiborne became food editor of The New York Times in 1957. Food editors didn’t really exist before him, at least in not any serious form. Thomas McNamee refers to him as The Man Who Changed the Way We Ate. Frank Bruni of The New York Times calls him “an anxious Southern man named Craig Claiborne sat on a remote island in the Pacific and plotted to turn the American culinary world on its head.” Claiborne also wrote a stream of bestselling cookbooks, including The New York Times Cookbook, The Chinese Cookbook, and Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet.
Don’t take any recipe on faith. There are some hostile recipes in this world.–Peg Bracken
One might say Ruth Eleanor “Peg” Bracken was an “anti-housewife”. She did what was necessary to take care of her family, who she loved very much, but did her chores “as seldom as possible.” Bracken wrote a series of humorous books on cooking, housekeeping, etiquette and travel, always conveying her point of view in a witty manner, which many housewives of the 60s related to. Her most well-known book out of the nine she wrote is the 1960 The I Hate to Cook Book. Bracken is quoted often.
Life is a combination of magic and pasta.–Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini, an Italian film director and scriptwriter, was born on January 20, 1920, in Rimini, Italy. Part of the Italian Neorealist movement, Fellini was known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images. His major works are La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. Fellini. “At least half of all film-makers asked about the directors they most admire include Federico Fellini in their top three,” says The Guardian, and he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, winning five Academy Awards, to become the person who won the highest number of Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film in history. He died October 31, 1993.
Claudia Roden is a cookbook writer and cultural anthropologist based in the United Kingdom. She was born in 1936 in Cairo, Egypt. A Book on Middle Eastern Food is a classic in the world of cookbooks, and James Beard referred to it as “a landmark in the field of cookery.”
Cookery is naturally the most ancient of the arts, as of all arts it is the most important.–George Ellwanger, Pleasures of the Table, 1903
George Ellwanger was a prominent horticulture scientist, born in Württemberg, Germany. Ellwanger immigrated to the United States, settling in Rochester, New York, where he and Patrick Barry formed the Mount Hope Nursery (also known as the Ellwanger and Barry Nursery) in 1840. In 1843, the nursery began publishing catalogs to increase sales.
“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.” (What Are People For?)
“Eating is an agricultural act.” (What Are People for Essays By Wendell Berry)
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.
Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” “A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us… What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.
But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.” (pg. 85, “Think Little“) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
Eduardo Amorim / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA
“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. (pg. 88, “Think Little”) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“…the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer…the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; …” (The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982)
“If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man’s only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place – a much humbler place than we have been taught to think – in the order of creation. (pg.89, “Think Little”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
“He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.”
“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. (pg. 27, “A Native Hill”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
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About Jonell Galloway
Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on a book, What to Eat in Venice
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However humble it may be, a meal has a definite plot, the intention of which is to intrigue, stimulate and satisfy.–Margaret Visser
Margaret Visser writes on the history, anthropology, and mythology of everyday life. She lives between Toronto, Paris and Southwest France.
Her most recent book is The Gift of Thanks. “Her previous books, Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, The Way We Are, and The Geometry of Love, have all been best sellers and have won major international awards, including the Glenfiddich Award for Foodbook of the Year in Britain in 1989, the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Literary Food Writing Award, and the Jane Grigson Award,” she says on her site.
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Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.
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When our souls are happy, they talk about food.–Charles Simic
Dušan “Charles” Simić is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of The Paris Review. He is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today, and his work has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his prose poem “The World Doesn’t End:”
I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.
He also received the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and, simultaneously, the Wallace Stevens Award and appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate.
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Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.
Food doesn’t exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented. –– Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is an American author, born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York. She developed a love for writing as a child, going on to become an acclaimed, bestselling scribe known for her novels, stories, poetry and essays, and winning the National Book Award for 1969’s them. Oates has had a prolific, award-winning career, with books such as A Garden of Earthly Delights, We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter and The Accursed.
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Simon de Swaan is Food and Beverage Director at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America and has an incredible collection of antique cookbooks and books about food and eating, from which he often posts interesting and unusual quotes. In his column Simon Says, he gives us daily food quotes from his tomes.
Food, like love, must never be a joyless experience.–Bert Greene
Bert Greene was a cookbook author and food columnist. His food column for the New York Daily News ran from 1979 until his death in 1988, and was eventually syndicated.
