BILL BUFORD

I bashed myself. I cut myself. I caught on fire. I fell: I had been myopically focused on peeling garlic, and hadn't noticed a bin of beef at my feet until I walked into it.

I just believe people should know what they're eating.

Giada De Laurentiis, of 'Everyday Italian,' is not a chef, although she has culinary expertise - she was trained at the Cordon Bleu and worked as a private cook for a wealthy Los Angeles family.

What is New York? A straightforward answer: seven million people crushed onto an island originally settled by the Dutch. But it's more than that. These are seven million who were, mainly, not even born here.

Since 1890, the Tour d'Argent's basic recipe hasn't changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now.

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.

The reality of America is mass-market stupidity.

Cable made the Food Network possible. It was invented in 1993 by Reese Schoenfeld, a co-founder of CNN, who was convinced that its natural audience was women - millions of them.

Lyon is unusual and seems to be exceptionally incompetent at publicising itself. In fact, it doesn't want visitors. It fears discovery.

Kasha is the hardy starch of a Slavic winter - buckwheat, in fact - but when cooked properly, it gets a nutty, deep-brown crust.

The 'classic' pig is inspired by northern Italy. It is made up of meat and fat, rosemary and garlic, salt and lots of black pepper.

The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. 'First, we cut our bread,' I whispered. 'Do you know why?' I stopped what I was doing and looked up. 'Let me tell you why.'

When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits - melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet... I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead - a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated.

Most chartreuse recipes call for one bird, a fat one, like a pigeon or a partridge, secreted inside the casing, a vegetable mold, which is then turned out onto a plate.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

Probably the single most important evolutionary trait dogs developed was right there at the outset, illuminated by the campfire. It is in those eyebrows and in the way dogs have of tilting their heads. They are warm packages of emotions.

Gramercy Park is a four-acre square given in perpetuity to the residents surrounding it, 170 years ago, by Samuel Ruggles, a real estate developer of immoderate means.

I didn't know why dessert was invented or what function it was meant to perform. Raising livestock and the harvesting of grains are ancient activities, but when did humankind decide it also needed creme brulee?

Tuscan sausages are smaller than their American cousins, each one demarcated with a string, a graceful loop drawn tightly into a knot - looping and tightening, looping and tightening, a symmetrically floppy, aesthetically appealing rhythm.

Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight.

The skyline in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' is made up: no, you don't get the Waldorf and the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and a dozen other magnificent structures in one window.

The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the 'myth of Mario' was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner.

The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of 'cocoa mass.'

For reasons I didn't understand, I felt I needed to learn how to cook the food of France and knew that I was going to have to get over to the country: to Paris, I'd always assumed.

Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the 'Guide Michelin,' is not a monster.