Irma S. Rombauer Quotes

I'm always changing my work, as there are endless ways to think about food.

I like that talented chefs are able to keep coming up with new ways of preparing food - it really is an art form.

When I walk into a market I may see a different cut of meat or an unusual vegetable and think, ‘I wonder how it would be if I took the recipe for that sauce I had in Provence and put the two together?’ So I go home and try it out. Sometimes my idea is a success and sometimes it is a flop, but that is how recipes are born. There really are not recipes, only millions of variations sparked by someone’s imagination and desire to be a little creative and different. American cooking is built, after all, on variations of old recipes from around the world.

Recipes are overrated.

It was quite a challenge to make people eat crab ice cream.

When France was the only reference for chefs to learn, you could go everywhere in the world, and they would copy dishes directly because they didn't have much expanded imagination or technique or knowledge.

I've always been fascinated by chefs and the worlds of chefs - what they do is incredibly cinematic.

I enjoy watching talented cooks bringing together ingredients into a fabulous dish.

It's very hard to be an innovator at the highest level in any discipline. For some chefs it's merely about combining ingredients, but that's something you can do with your eyes closed.

I love food and am very good at improvising when preparing it - it's a really creative experience for me.

To become a good cook is to know yourself, and I, at this point, know myself. I know myself, and I know the cook I want to be and the cook I am striving to be.

Cooking is for chefs. Science informs us and lets us cook while knowing what we are doing, but it is not a replacement for the skills of a chef.

I appreciate the constant evolution in refining food, but not in making food gimmicky.

I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills... all apart from cooking.

I do not stick to rules when cooking. I rely on my imagination.

I do a lot of recipe creation. Translation: cooking tempting dishes that must be eaten.

I can cook to please people, but it's quite conventional. I make a good sponge cake. I find it hard to follow recipes.

Your idea of that dish has evolved, and if you're a cook, you can start thinking in different ways about it, maybe even a different way than I think about it.

When I go out shopping and pass a bookstore, I always grab a couple of cookbooks, so I have a library of them. I end up keeping many that I got years and years ago because they work so well.

In Tijuana, because there's such a mix and match of people and regions and we're a newer city and everyone comes from some place else, I think we're just given permission to play with our food.

I love cooking shows! I'm not a bad cook myself, but I must say that I admire the creativity of those young chefs. It makes me jealous... and hungry.

I just love to look at cookbooks, it's almost like they're comic books for me. I can't look at them before bed; it gets me too excited.

Cuisine Nouvelle was just a concept, and one which, crucially, the English managed to get wrong. I mean, if you run a restaurant, you've got to feed people, not make pretty little pictures on plates to make up for your lack of ability.

Because I am a chef, I have to try new things all the time, so it's been really good to have my family to be able to be there and test everything out.

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical.