Jeremy Jackson Quotes

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.

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

You know, for 300 years it's been kind of the same. There are restaurants in New Orleans that the menu hasn't changed in 125 years, so how is one going to change or evolve the food?

My cooking style is exactly like my mother's.

My husband, Vivek Deora - he is very meticulous about cooking, and slowly and lovingly makes his family recipes, handed down generations.

My mom's collard greens. No one else in the world can make them like hers. I'm not just saying that because she's my mom. She's got some Mississippi secret. I could seriously eat them every day.

But since you're asking me, I'll tell you my opinion: all cornbread is authentic, as long as it's good, hot, and made with love and fresh ingredients.

The idea of old was to conform yourself to a style of cooking, it was not to create a style of cooking. Now the chef is so much into 'I want to sign that dish and say I am the one who made that dish.'

Many of the things the slow food people honor were innovations within historical times. Somebody had to be the first European to eat a tomato.

Some of the recipes in the book have evolved for us. Many haven't.

In the 1970s we got nouvelle cuisine, in which a lot of the old rules were kicked over. And then we had cuisine minceur, which people mixed up with nouvelle cuisine but was actually fancy diet cooking.

I'm surprised by the talent I find all over. There are always new chefs who propose many interesting new ideas, new ways of looking at ingredients.

For me to go casual is not to go simple. To me, it is to be able to bring back the art of tradition and the soul of French food and my interpretation of that.

There was no Internet, not even many cookbooks except the old reference books. So we would sit down at night, a group of six chefs, and we'd exchange recipes and each talk about how we were doing things. It was the only way to learn new ideas.

Nobody cooks anymore. To me, to watch your parents cook, and to have a house that smells warm and delicious, is a very vital memory that I think kids don't really have anymore.

I like to talk about food, ingredients, and how to adapt recipes. It's a dialogue.

I think Spain will always remain inspirational, and I think French cuisine will continue to be very French and yet very relevant with its time and keep evolving. But the last thing you want for it is to become too trendy and confusing. It has too much history.

What has impressed me the most about the Italians whose tables we've sat at is that they are traditional cooks but also outrageously innovative. These people are wild improvisers.

Usually I wear my grandma's old aprons, or others I have collected in my travels. When I was young, I would sit and watch my grandma prepare stuff. She wasn't Italian, but she did really good Italian food.

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.

There's just so much love that goes into home cooking, and I think it will really help the American family overall. I'm hoping to maybe get a cookbook out one day because I've got some great family recipes.

All the women in my family were superb cooks.

You have to know the classics if you want to cook modern food.

I was raised cooking my grandmother's food, my mom's recipes.