National Cuisine Quotes

Just because something is English does not necessarily mean it is good. We make the best cheddar; we make great pasties. But we can't make very good brie or baguettes - and the French can't make pork pies.

England understands good Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisine; in France, we just get French.

New Zealand has better food - sorry, America.

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

In France cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking's sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don't know the basics, you turn out slop.

People ask me in Europe, when they do interviews... they ask me, 'Well, how does it feel to be a cook in a country that doesn't know how to eat?' It always touches a nerve, because Europe and the world think that America is no more than bad hot dogs and bad burgers.

You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It [Great Britain] is the country with the worst food after Finland.

Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

Everyone's past is locked up in their recipes - the past of an individual and the past of a nation as well.

I think, British food, it's had a bad rap.

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

We all know that Nigerian jollof rice is the best anywhere. We beat the Ghanaians and Senegalese hands down.

Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want. I used to think that the notoriously bad cooking of the English was an example to the contrary, and that the English cook the way they do because, through sheer technical deficiency, they had not been able to master the art of cooking. I have discovered to my stupefaction that the English cook that way because that is the way they like it.

I would have thought you'd import an English staff?" "Good heavens, no! I would not wish a British chef on anyone except the French tax collectors.

I want people to buy British because it's the tastiest food and the most exciting food.

After spending so much time in America, I started travelling with 'In Defence of English Cooking' by George Orwell. It's archaic and old-fashioned in its Englishness and reminds me of home.

Food can be utilized for economic reasons, like the grain embargo of Carter 40 years ago. You have a political decision, you are going to move the flow of food in a part of the world and not another part of the world. And certainly now, with the way the country is polarized and all that, you wouldn't want to have a French menu, with a French thing - you'd be crucified! Or anything like that. You have to be a real American and apple pie and this and that.

the seat of the greatest patriotic loyalties is in the stomach. Long after giving up all attachment to the land of his birth, the naturalized American citizen holds fast to the food of his parents.

My father once said there's a correlation between a nation's cuisine and its people: England, nice people, nasty food; France, nice food, nasty people; Spain, nice people, nasty food; Italy, nice people, nice food; and Germany, nasty food, nasty people. And I've always thought that there must be something terribly wrong with the German character - and that there is, really.

I know you're Belgian, that's where those waffles come from.

Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want.