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FOOD QUOTES SECTION

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Cookery Quotes

"When there is no more cookery in the world, there will be no more letters, no quick and lofty intelligence, no pleasant easy relationships; no more social unity."
Antonin Carême (Marie-Antoine Carême) (1783-1833)
 

"Good cookery is the food of a pure conscience."
Des Essarts (French actor) (1740-1793)
 

"Cookery is an old art, as it goes back to Adam."
Marquis de Cussy

“In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
 

"Cookery means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe and of Helen and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs and fruits and balms and spices, and all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves and savory in meats. It means carefulness and inventiveness and willingness and readiness of appliances. It means the economy of your grandmothers and the science of the modern chemist; it means much testing and no wasting; it means English thoroughness and French art in Arabian hospitality; and, in fine, it means that you are to be perfectly and always ladies -- loaf givers."
John Ruskin, Quoted in the first edition of the ‘Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896).
 

"What science demands more study than Cookery? You have not only, as in other arts, to satisfy the general eye, but also the individual taste of the persons who employ you; you have to attend to economy, which every one demands; to suit the taste of different persons at the same table; to surmount the difficulty of procuring things which are necessary to your work; to undergo the want of unanimity among the servants of the house; and the mortification of seeing unlimited confidence sometimes reposed in persons who are unqualified to give orders in the kitchen, without assuming consequence, and giving themselves airs which are almost out of reason, and which frequently discourage the Cook."
Louis Eustache Ude (1813)
 

"Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery."
Fannie Farmer
 

"Kissing don't last: cookery do!"
George Meredith, British novelist (1828-1909)
 

"Cookery is like matrimony. Two things served together should match. Clear should go with clear, thick with thick, hard with hard, and soft with soft. I have known people to mix grated lobster with birds' nests, and mint with chicken or pork!"
Yuan Mei, 18th century Chinese gastronome
 

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

"Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen."
Robert Burton (1577-1640)
 

"There are few decisive acts in cookery, each step contributes to the end result."
Claude Peyrot, 20th century French Chef
 

“As in the fine arts, the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, so in the art of cookery is the progress gradual from the earliest and simplest modes, to those of the most complicated and refined.”
Isabella Beeton (1836-1865)
‘The Book of Household Management’ (1861)
 

“Cookery is as old as the world, but it must also remain, always, as modern as fashion.”
Phileas Gilbert (1857-1942)
 

“Cookery is naturally the most ancient of the arts, as of all arts it is the most important.”
George Ellwanger (1848-1906) ‘Pleasures of the Table’ (1902)
 

“Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, or rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the latest cultivated branches of the science.”
Frederick Accum (1769-1838)
 

“The economy of the kitchen is only a counterpart, in its simplicity or complication, its rudeness or luxury, of the economy of the State. The perfectibility of cookery indicates the perfectibility of society. The progress of cookery is the progress of civilisation.”
Frederick W. Hackwood, ‘Good Cheer’ (1911)