The Quotes

To add color and sometimes to fill empty pages here and there, these are the quotes that appeared in the 2010 printing of the Clotiaux Family Cookbook…

Cooking is an art and patience a virtue …
Careful shopping, fresh ingredients and an unhurried approach are nearly all you need. There is one more thing — love. Love for food and love for those you invite to your table. With a combination of these things you can be an artist — not perhaps in the representational style of a Dutch master, but rather more like Gauguin, the naïve, or Van Gogh, the impressionist. Plates or pictures of sunshine taste of happiness and love.

KEITH FLOYD
FROM “A FEAST OF FLOYD”

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Within the South itself, no other form of cultural expression, not even music, is as distinctively characteristic of the region as the spreading of a feast of native food and drink before a gathering of kin and friends.

JOHN EGERTON

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Laughter is brightest where food is best.

IRISH PROVERB

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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

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The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments
of polite society except the minuet.

JUDITH MARTIN

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We are not meant to dine alone. Food is pleasure; it wants to be shared. Shared pleasure is the most intimate and fulfilling category of human experience, and letting someone else prepare food for you is an act of trust. This is why dining, at its best, must ultimately be about hospitality; my most memorable meals have left me feeling not only satisfied, but grateful. These connections between guest, host, and meal are all bound up in an essential sense of respect — for the life we consume, for the skill of its preparation, for the trust in that skill, for the pleasure of the shared experience.
Jeremy Frost

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Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.

JAMES BEARD

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The dinner table is where some of our fondest and most humorous family memories can occur. The dinner table should be a place of comfort, a place where no one is criticized or ridiculed, a place where you don’t get in trouble, but instead find reassurance and joy.

TAMI VANHOY

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All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.

JOHN GUNTHER

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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

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Cooking is like love.
It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

HARRIET VAN HORNE

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Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.

DOUG LARSON

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A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.

ELSA SCHIAPARELLI

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The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…

DIONE LUCAS

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Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well one must love and respect food.

CRAIG CLAIBORNE

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The gentle art of gastronomy is a friendly one. It hurdles the language barrier, makes friends among
civilized people, and warms the heart.

SAMUEL CHAMBERLAIN

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Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

M.F.K. FISHER

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We may live without friends;
We may live without books;
But civilized man cannot
live without cooks.

MEREDITH OWEN

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Laughter is brightest where food is best.

IRISH PROVERB

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The most indispensable ingredient of all good home cooking: love, for those you are cooking for.

SOPHIA LOREN

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A good meal soothes the soul as it regenerates the body. From the abundance of it flows a benign benevolence.

FREDERICK W. HACKWOOD

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One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

LUCIANO PAVAROTTI

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I’m a man. Men cook outside. Women make the three-bean salad. That’s the way it is and always has been, since the first settlers of Levittown. That outdoor grilling is a manly pursuit has long been beyond question. If this wasn’t firmly understood, you’d never get grown men to put on those aprons with pictures of dancing wienies and things on the front.

WILLIAM GEIST, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

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Marmalade in the morning has the same effect on taste buds that a cold shower has on the body.

JEANINE LARMOTH

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Cranberries: The Indians and English use them much, boyling them with sugar for sauce to eat with their meat, and it is a delicious sauce.

JOHN JOSSELYN
WHILE VISITING NEW ENGLAND, 1663

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… even those for whom cooking is an oppressive chore or a source of self-doubting anxiety, acknowledge that a meal shared by friends and family is one of the bonding rituals without which the family, society even, can fall apart.

ANTONIA TILL

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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.

LAURIE COLWIN

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The greatest delight the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. ‘I am not alone and unacknowledged.’ They nod to me and I to them.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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The recipe for keeping the modern family together still begins in the kitchen.

ANONYMOUS

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If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN

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To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense.

JOHN IRVING
THE CIDER HOUSE RULES

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Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale.

ELSA SCHIAPARELLI

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Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.

SAMUEL PEPYS

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Pork — no animal is more used for nourishment and none more indispensable in the kitchen; employed either fresh or salt, all is useful, even to its bristles and its blood; it is the superfluous riches of the farmer, and helps to pay the rent of the cottager.

ALEXIS SOYER
THE MODERN HOUSEWIFE, 1851

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The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.

ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN

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Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

FELLIINI

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If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.

FERNAND POINT

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Talk of joy: there may be things better than beef stew and baked potatoes and home-made bread — there may be.

DAVID GRAYSON
ADVENTURES OF CONTENTMENT, 1907

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It is, in my view, the duty of an apple to be crisp and crunchable, but a pear should have such a texture as leads to silent consumption.

EDWARD BUNYARD
THE ANATOMY OF DESSERT

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Scallops are expensive, so they should be treated with some class. But then, I suppose that every creature that gives his life for our table should be treated with class.

JEFF SMITH
THE FRUGAL GOURMET

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Soul food is our personal passport to the past. It is much more about heritage than it is about hominy.

SARAH BAN BREATHNACH

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My kitchen is a mystical place, a kind of temple for me. It is a place where the surfaces seem to have significance, where the sounds and odors carry meaning that transfers from the past and bridges to the future.

PEARL BAILEY

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It takes four men to dress a salad: a wise man for the salt, a madman for the pepper, a miser for the vinegar, and a spendthrift for the oil.

ANONYMOUS

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Give me book, fruit, French wine, and fine weather and a little music out of doors played by someone I do not know.

JOHN KEATS

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What is more refreshing than salads when your appetite seems to have deserted you, or even after a capacious dinner — the nice, fresh, green, and crisp salad, full of life and health, which seems to invigorate the palate and dispose the masticating powers to a much lorger duration.

ALEXIS SOYER

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Peace of mind and a comfortable income are predicted by a dream of eating potatoes in any form.

NED BALLANTYNE & STELLA COELI
YOUR HOROSCOPE AND YOUR DREAMS, 1940

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Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because
cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity
as drawing, or wood carving, or music.

JULIA CHILD

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Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.

DOUG LARSON

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The potato, like man, was not meant to dwell alone.

SHILA HIBBEN

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The universal food of the people of Texas, both rich and poor, seems to be corn-dodger and fried bacon.
Frederick Law Olmstead

A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS, 1856

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The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

FANNY FERN

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All knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost, in self defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature.

CHARLES DICKENS (ON AMERICAN MEALS)

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Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili.

HARRY JAMES

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Cuisine is the tactile connection we have to breathing history. History and culture offer us a vibrant living society that we taste through cuisine. All cuisine is a reflection of the society from which it emanates ... in the end cuisine is the result of culture.

CLIFFORD WRIGHT

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Only the pure of heart can make good soup.

BEETHOVEN

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The best kind of onion soup is the simplest kind.

AMBROSE BIERCE

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As the days grow short, some faces grow long. But not mine. Every autumn, when the wind turns cold
and darkness comes early, I am suddenly happy. It’s time to start making soup again.

LESLIE NEWMAN