The most famous line in gastronomic history, 'Let them eat cake', turns out to have been an eighteenth-century cliche. According to Antonia Fraser, the French accused every foreign queen of saying it, beginning in 1670 with the wife of Louis XIV, Marie Theresa.
Man is an animal that cooks his victuals.
A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.
My most cherished possessions are my grandma's letters and my vintage Martha Washington cookbook.
As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible.
I know people think I invented the Victoria sandwich, but I'm really not that old.
The history of cooking is my passion, and cooking is my passion.
I am certain that the good Lord never intended grapes to be made into grape jelly.
I opened Leith's in Notting Hill in 1969 and it eventually worked its way into being awarded a Michelin star. At the time, there were a few women running small bistros - but I was the first woman to have a 'serious,' expensive restaurant.
Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.
Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons.
Dione Lucas has been obscured by larger-than-life personalities like Julia Child, but she had it going on. She is like the horse that came in second place, whose name we can't remember. It takes more than just one horse to make a race.
In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.
It took me years to eat a lot of shellfish. I was probably 20 years old before I had even seen a shrimp cocktail. I like oysters, but fried.
We know so much about the European food story, and we're getting to know about the American food story; but we know so little about the African food story.
It's hard to imagine a time when lobster pots weren't part of a well-equipped kitchen, but America's love affair with the two-clawed crustaceans didn't start until the 1800s.
The Romans brought with them spices such as ginger, pepper and cinnamon, and herbs including borage, chervil, dill, fennel, lovage, sage and thyme, all of which have remained staples of the British kitchen.
The Italians were eating with forks when the French were still eating each other.
To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it's actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami.
Romanian-Yiddish cooking has killed more Jews than Hitler
History is about life. It's awful when the life is squeezed out of it and there's no flavor left, no uncertainties, no horsing around. It always disturbed me how many biographers never gave their subjects a chance to eat. You can tell a lot about people by how they eat, what they eat, and what kind of table manners they have.
M. F. K. Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life.
A slab of bread "buttered" with lard and, if you were lucky, seasoned with salt and pepper, was a luxury.
I have been collecting recipes and information for over 20 years, but three years ago, my editor said to me, 'You're a walking encyclopedia of food, so why don't you do an encyclopedia?'
Writers like John T. Edge, whose work is all about the cultural histories behind food, have done so much to show that these stories are a really vital part of our cultural heritage.
