A Literary Culinary Journal
If you’re happy, you eat. If you’re sad, you eat. You lose a job, you eat. You get a job, you eat. It’s, you know, it’s addiction.–Barbara Cook
Photo courtesy of Theater Mania.
Barbara Cook is a Broadway singer and actress who won a Tony Award for her role in The Music Man in 1957. Today she performs in concert and in cabarets.
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Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.–John Cage
Apart from being a very gifted composer, poet, artist and print maker, John Cage was an amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.
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For the first time I know what it is to eat. I have gained four pounds. I get frantically hungry, and the food I eat gives me a lingering pleasure. I never ate before in this deep carnal way… I want to bite into life and to be torn by it.–Anaïs Nin (1903 – 1977)
The daughter of Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, Anaïs Nin is most known for her diaries but she is also the author of numerous novels, poems and erotic short stories which were published after her death. In 1974 she was elected into the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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Food is the most primitive form of comfort.—Sheila Graham
Sheila Graham was a notable gossip columnist and author during Hollywood’s “Golden Age” who met and became romantically involved with F. Scott Fitzgerald, an affair which she chronicled in her autobiography, Beloved Infidel: The Education of a Woman (1958, with Gerold Frank), a bestseller which was made into a movie starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr. Born in Britain, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen and died in Palm Beach, Florida, in November 1988 at the age of 84.
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by Chez Pim
Happy and successful cooking doesn’t rely only on know-how; it comes from the heart, makes great demands on the palate and needs enthusiasm and a deep love of food to bring it to life.–Georges Blanc, Ma Cuisine des Saisons
Georges Blanc is considered one of France’s greatest chefs. His restaurant, which he took over from his grandmother, known as “La Mère Blanc,” and mother, is located in the small village of Vonnas near Bourg-en-Bresse. Bresse is considered by most to produce the best chickens in France, and Blanc’s chicken in cream sauce is hailed as being the best in all of Burgundy. It is his grandmother’s recipe.
George Blanc's poulet à la crème.
Photo courtesy of Chez Pim.
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by Jonell Galloway
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.–Wendell Berry
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by Simon de Swaan and Jonell Galloway
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.–Wendell Berry (page 89, “Think Little”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
Photo courtesy of Festival of Faiths.
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by Simon de Swaan and Jonell Galloway
All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.–John Gunther
John Gunther is best known for his 500-page tome Inside Europe about pre-war and wartime Europe, and went on to write “inside” books about several continents. They were translated into 90 languages and sold by the millions around the world. As he traveled around the world, he wined and dined in the highest places.
His description of Hitler in Inside Europe is unforgettable:
He reads almost nothing. He dislikes intellectuals. He has never been outside Germany since his youth in Austria and speaks no foreign language, except a few words of French. He is nearly oblivious of ordinary personal contacts. A colleague of mine traveled with him, in the same airplane, day after day, for two months during the 1932 electoral campaigns. Hitler never talked to a soul, not even to his secretaries, in the long hours in the air; never stirred; never smiled.
Photo courtesy of NNDB.
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Jenn Oliver writes our column Culinary Chemistry. She has a Ph.D. in science, where she explains the scientific aspects of what really goes on when you cook (the next Harold McGee?). She’s been running a gluten-free blog, Jenn Cuisine, since 2008 and her kitchen is more like a laboratory than a kitchen. She’s focuses her chemical calculations and experiments on figuring out how to make traditionally glutinous food gluten-free.
Esmaa Self writes the Wild Woman on Feral Acres column. She lives on a small farm in Colorado where she employs organic and sustainable methods to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs, raise chickens, bees and fish and where she routinely turns out imaginative, healthy, guilt-free meals from scratch. One of her numerous blogs recounts her farming adventures: Backyard Eggs. She also writes novels and contributes to numerous organic farming and green publications, and runs a sustainable living site, Homeostasis.
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.
Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is an essayist, editor and journalist. He directed the special editions of the Nouvel Observateur for almost ten years and and has published twenty books. As preparation for publication of his Universal Dictionary of Bread (Dictionnaire universel du pain, Bouquins Laffont, 2010), he obtained a baker’s certificate (CAP) at the Ecole de Boulangerie et Pâtisserie de Paris in 2007, and traveled worldwide to countries where bread held a particular cultural significance.
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by Simon de Swaan and Jonell Galloway
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.–Virginia Woolf
Click here to hear the recorded voice of Virginia Woolf.
Photo courtesy of NickNich4.
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Meet Jonell Galloway, a freelance writer and editor specialized in French cuisine. 
