Fabulous Food Quotes

Chefs, authors, musicians, actors, poets, so many of us have very strong feelings about food.  Why is food so emotional?  Scents of food stir up childhood memories, cooking for and feeding someone is one of the sweetest gestures in the world, even watching someone eat can be a delight.  Food and love are undeniably connected.

We’ve been collecting some of our favorite food quotes for quite some time, and have neatly bundled them here. Enjoy!

“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

“Eggs Benedict is genius. It’s eggs covered in eggs. I mean, come on, that person should be the president.”
– Wylie Dufresne

“Desserts are like mistresses. They are bad for you. So if you are having one,
you might as well have two.”
– Chef Alain Ducasse

“Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.”
– Garrison Keillor

“I’ve long said that if I were about to be executed and were given a choice of my last meal, it would be bacon and eggs. There are few sights that appeal to me more than the streaks of lean and fat in a good side of bacon, or the lovely round of pinkish meat framed in delicate white fat that is Canadian bacon. Nothing is quite as intoxicating as the smell of bacon frying in the morning, save perhaps the smell of coffee brewing.”
– James Beard

“Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct
and taste rather than exact measurements.”
– Marcel Boulestin

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
– Virginia Woolf

“In my experience of vegan food it tends to be a symphony of beige.”
– Jay Rayner

“Eating chicken without skin is like riding a bike without wheels”
– Chef Michael Symon

“You know how I feel about tacos. It’s the only food shaped like a smile. A beef smile.”
– Earl Hickey, My Name is Earl

“Vegetarians claim to be immune from most diseases but they have been known to die from time to time.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.”
– John Gunther

“I asked the waiter, ‘Is this milk fresh?’ He said, ‘Lady, three hours ago it was grass.”
– Phyllis Diller

“Ingredients are not sacred. The art of cuisine is sacred. It is at that altar I worship, and I shall go to sacrifice the fat geese and tender cattle to serve its ends. The holy icons of the chef’s faith—fragrant truffles, rich foie gras, well-marbled meats and other luxurious ingredients – these are not God. Their synthesis and their miraculous transformation into a sum greater than its parts is creation, and this is what I find most worthy of reverence.”
– Tanith Tyrr

“I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around.”
– James Beard

“Plain fresh bread, its crust shatteringly crisp. Sweet cold butter. There is magic in the way they come together in your mouth to make a single perfect bite.
– Ruth Reichl

Truffles from Mont-Ventoux, image via wikimedia commons

“Truffle isn’t exactly aphrodisiac but under certain circumstances it tends to make women more tender and men more likable”
– J.A. Brillat-Savarin

“At the time I write, the glory of the truffle has now reached its culmination. Who would dare to say that he has been at a dinner where there was not a pièce truffée? Who has not felt his mouth water in hearing truffles a la provencale spoken of? In fine, the truffle is the very diamond of gastronomy.”
– J.A. Brillat-Savarin

“The most learned men have been questioned as to the nature of this tuber, and after two thousand years of argument and discussion their answer is the same as it was on the first day: we do not know. The truffles themselves have been interrogated, and have answered simply: eat us and praise the Lord.”
– Alexandre Dumas

“When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cosy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender, of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.”
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Life is so brief that we should not glance either too far backwards or forwards…therefore study how to fix our happiness in our glass and in our plate.”
– Grimod de la Reynière

“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

“Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements.”
– Chef Marcel Boulestin

“And don’t forget music – music in the kitchen is an essential ingredient!”
– Thomas Keller

“I have long believed that good food, good eating is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure.”
– Anthony Bourdain

“Understanding the science of cooking is what makes a chef good. Applying artistry to make it beautiful makes a chef better. Being great depends how much you care.”
– Unnamed super yacht chef

“Remember that a very good sardine is always preferable to a not that good lobster.”
– Ferran Adria

“I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal.”
– Martha Harrison

“Salt is born of the purest of parents: the sun and the sea.”
– Pythagoras

“In Mexico we have a word for sushi: bait.”
– Jose Simon

“Great restaurants are, of course, nothing but mouth-brothels. There is no point in going to them if one intends to keep one’s belt buckled.”
– Frederic Raphael

“There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.”
– MFK Fisher

“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in it’s evocation of innocence and delight.”
– MFK Fisher

“I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.”
– Graham Kerr

“A man taking basil from a woman will love her always.”
– Sir Thomas Moore

“Cooking is like love, it should be entered into with abandon or not at all.”
–  Harriet Van Horne, Vogue 10/1956

“To give life to beauty, the painter uses a whole range of colours, musicians of sounds, the cook of tastes — and it is indeed remarkable that there are seven colours, seven musical notes and seven tastes.”
– Lucien Tendret (1825-1896) ‘La Table au pays de Brillat-Savarin’

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,’ said Piglet at last, ‘what’s the first thing you say to yourself?’ ‘What’s for breakfast?’ said Pooh. ‘What do you say, Piglet?’ ‘I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?’ said Piglet. Pooh nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s the same thing,’ he said.”
– A. A. Milne, ‘The House at Pooh Corner’

“How do they taste? They taste like more.”
– H.L. Mencken

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“Of all the items on the menu, soup is that which exacts the most delicate perfection and the strictest attention.”
– Escoffier

“There are many miracles in the world to be celebrated and, for me, garlic is the most deserving.”
– Leo Buscaglia

“Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.”

Sicilian cannoli, via wikimedia creative commons

– Clemenza, in The Godfather

“A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that’s when cuisine is truly exciting.”
– Charlie Trotter

“He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast in his heart.”
– C. S. Lewis

“To be tempted and indulged by the city’s most brilliant chefs. It’s the dream of every one of us in love with food.”
– Gael Greene

“Great food is like great sex. The more you have the more you want.”
– Gael Greene

“To eat is a necessity, to eat intelligiently is an art.” La Rochefoucauld

“The tradition of Italian cooking is that of the matriarch. This is the cooking of grandma. She didn’t waste time thinking too much about the celery. She got the best celery she could and then she dealt with it.”
– Mario Batali

“You sit down at Katz’s and you eat the big bowl of pickles and you’re eating the pastrami sandwich, and halfway through you say to yourself, I should really wrap this up and save it for tomorrow. But the sandwich is calling you: Remember the taste you just had. So fatty. It’s what you want. It’s what you are! I’ve never gotten home from Katz’s with a doggie bag in my hand. A pastrami sandwich at Katz’s is what’s bad and good about food. It’s the sacred and the profane.”
– Mario Batali

“The Italians were eating with forks when the French were still eating each other.”
– Mario Batali

“It’s bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children’s health than the pediatrician.”
– Meryl Streep

“New York is the greatest city in the world for lunch… That’s the gregarious time. And when that first martini hits the liver like a silver bullet, there is a sigh of contentment that can be heard in Dubuque.”
– William Emerson Jr.

“Pounding fragrant things — particularly garlic, basil, parsley — is a tremendous antidote to depression. But it applies also to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chilli pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one’s being — from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated. Virgil’s appetite was probably improved equally by pounding garlic as by eating it.”
– Patience Gray, author

“There is nothing like a plate or a bowl of hot soup, it’s wisp of aromatic steam making the nostrils quiver with anticipation, to dispel the depressing effects of a grueling day at the office or the shop, rain or snow in the streets, or bad news in the papers.”
– Louis P. De Gouy, The Soup Book (1949)

“Food without wine is a corpse; wine without food is a ghost; united and well mitched they are as body and soul, living partners.”
– Andre Simon (1877-1970)

“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relatives.”
– Oscar Wilde

“Life is too short for self-hatred and celery sticks.”
– Marilyn Wann

“Two words to improve any dish. Ba, Con”
– Ted Allen, The Iron Chef

“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

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy, and to make plans.”
– Ernest Hemingway

American MD and poet William Carlos Williams couldn’t resist plums:

…Most likely not  historical but we love this response to William’s poem…

“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

“He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.”
– Henry David Thoreau

“Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are.”
– Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

“I went to a restaurant that serves ‘breakfast at any time’. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”
– Steven Wright

“You can never have enough garlic. With enough garlic, you can eat The New York Times.”
– Morley Safer

“Enchant, stay beautiful and graceful, but do this, eat well. Bring the same consideration to the preparation of your food as you devote to your appearance. Let your dinner be a poem, like your dress.”
– Charles Pierre Monselet,French journalist

“A gourmet who thinks of calories is like a tart who looks at her watch”
– James Beard

“Grilling, broiling, barbecuing – whatever you want to call it – is an art, not just a matter of building a pyre and throwing on a piece of meat as a sacrifice to the gods of the stomach.”
– James Beard

“All sorrows are less with bread.”
– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
– Mark Twain

And the drumroll please…for Julia Child!

“You have to eat to cook. You can’t be a good cook and be a noneater. I think eating is the secret to good cooking.”

“Dining with one’s friends and beloved family is certainly one of life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal,”

“In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.”

“The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.”

– Julia Child

Do you have an signature quote of your own, or a favorite food quote from another? Please enlighten us in the comment section!