Kitchen Quotes

“It’s the kind of kitchen people don’t just cook in, they live in it. Just stepping into it reminds me of where I am, and I’m at home instantly.", Loving Summer by Kailin Gow”
― Kailin Gow

“Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“There has ling been a happy symbiotic relationship between kitchen and bar. Simply put, the kitchen wants booze, and the bartender wants food.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“Nights alone in my yellow kitchen, I made myself hot chocolate. I missed my mother. In my window, maple leaves rusted, young fall blooming.”
― Aspen Matis

“As an art form, cooktalk is, like haiku or kabuki, defined by established rules, with a rigid, traditional framework in which one may operate.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“To want to own a restaurant can be a strange and terrible affliction. What causes such a destructive urge in so many otherwise sensible people? Why would anyone who has worked hard, saved money, often been successful in other fields, want to pump their hard-earned cash down a hole that statistically, at least, will almost surely prove dry? Why venture into an industry with enormous fixed expenses (...), with a notoriously transient and unstable workforce, and highly perishable inventory of assets? The chances of ever seeing a return on your investment are about one in five. What insidious spongi-form bacteria so riddles the brains of men and women that they stand there on the tracks, watching the lights of the oncoming locomotive, knowing full well it will eventually run over them? After all these years in the business, I still don't know.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“All food is just a vehicle for transporting butter to my mouth”
― Tyne O'Connell

“I made the coffee myself in Armande's curious small kitchen with its cast-iron range and low ceiling. Everything is clean there, but the one tiny window looks onto the river, giving the light a greenish underwater look. Hanging from the dark, unpainted beams are bunches of dry herbs in their muslin sachets. On the whitewashed walls, copper pans hang from hooks. The door- like all the doors in the house- has a hole cut into the base to allow free passage to her cats.”
― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“Sensuality is the real soul food.”
― Lebo Grand

“The business, as respected three-star chef Scott Bryan explains it, attracts 'fringe elements', people for whom something in their lives has gone terribly wrong.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

“La cucina bears the scents of its past, and every event in its history is recorded with an olfactory memorandum. Here vanilla, coffee, nutmeg, and confidences; there the milky-sweet smell of babies, old leather, sheep's cheese, and violets. In the corner by the larder hangs the stale tobacco smell of old age and death, while the salty scent of lust and satiation clings to the air by the cellar steps along with the aroma of soap, garlic, beeswax, lavender, jealousy, and disappointment.”
― Lily Prior, La Cucina

“The sight of iniquity, immorality, pure evil, perhaps the world's end; a kitchen in disorder.”
― Kate Quinn, The Serpent and the Pearl

“Pots hung from the ceiling beams, between the festoons of braided garlic, the hams, the salsicce, bunches of mountain herbs for medicine, strings of dried porcini, necklaces of dried apple rings in winter, chains of dried figs. The smell of onions, of hot lard and smoldering oak wood, of cinnamon and pepper, always seemed to hang in the air. The larder was full of meat at all times, needless to say: not small pieces, but huge joints and sides of beef and lamb, which Mamma and Carenza could never hope to use just for our household, and which were quietly passed on to the monks of Santa Croce so that they could feed the poor. Carenza made salami with fennel seeds and garlic, prosciutto, pancetta. Sometimes the air in the larder was so salty that it stung your nostrils, and sometimes it reeked of spoiled blood from the garlands of hares, rabbits, quail, thrushes and countless other creatures that would arrive, bloody and limp, from Papa's personal game dealer.
Next to the larder, a door led out to our courtyard, which Mamma had kept filled with herbs. An ancient rosemary bush took up most of one side, and the air in summer was always full of bees. Sage, thyme, various kinds of mint, oregano, rocket, hyssop, lovage and basil grew in Mamma's collection of old terra-cotta pots. A fig tree was slowly pulling down the wall, and a tenacious, knotted olive tree had been struggling for years in the sunniest corner.”
― Philip Kazan, Appetite

“The kitchen. Scent of cumin, ajwain and cardamom. On the table, a little pile of nutmeg. Thick, oily vapor rose from the pot on the stove. The room was warm and spacious, the window high and wide. Tiny drops of condensation covered the top of the glass. Smoke soared towards the ceiling in shafts of light. I noticed many shiny pots and pans hanging on the whitewashed walls. And strings of lal mirchi, and idli makers, and thalis, and conical molds for kulfi. In the corner the tandoor was ready. Its orange glow stirred in the utensils on the walls.”
― Jaspreet Singh, Chef

“Its kitchens were enormous and capable of being put to any use except the convenient preparation of food.”
― Tom Holt, Expecting Someone Taller

“I helped myself to coffee and brought it to the little kitchen table. I'd eaten baby food at that table, and I'd done my homework at it too. The refrigerator and the stove got changed out, but the table remained. It was the heart of the kitchen, and the kitchen was the heart of the house. Even after the attempted kidnapping, the kitchen still felt safe. Even with my mother nipping at the whiskey and my grandmother reading the obits for entertainment, the kitchen felt sane. Going with Grandma's theory, I was pretty confident that all our souls were intact, and that the kitchen was partly responsible for keeping them that way.”
― Janet Evanovich, Twisted Twenty-Six

“No one became a great cook just by reading the recipes.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Live in a young girl's bedroom, but eat from an old woman's kitchen.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“Las palabras son siempre demasiado explicítas y apagan del todo el valor de una luz tenue como aquélla.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that's stronger than this--kitchen-- candle...”
― Tennessee Williams

“Everything in here was clean and bright, warm and cosy. What a joy it is in life when you happen to have a clean, warm kitchen.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“মশলার ইহুদি যাজক
যাঁর শ্বাস এক ক্রিয়াপদ,
দাড়ি তাঁর বেশ পাতলা
আর একটা শাদা আলখাল্লা :
আপনি, যিনি রোগা আর ক্ষুদে
আর চেহারা মুঠোর মতো,
এক ইহুদি ধর্মস্হান,
আমাদের তিক্ততাকে আশীর্বাদ করেন,
রান্নাঘরকে শ্রেষ্ঠ করে তুলে
মৃত্যুকে মিষ্টতা দেবার জন্য--
শিখায় আমাদের মোম
আর রুটিতে আমাদের বীজ
আমার দাদু বসে থাকেন
আমার কাকারা পুরে দ্যান
আমার মুখে ছাই ।”
― Bert Meyers, In a Dybbuk's Raincoat: Collected Poems

“मसाला यहूदी धर्मगुरु
जिसकी सांस एक क्रिया है,
उनकी दाढ़ी काफी पतली है
और एक लाल लबादा:
आप, जो रोगग्रस्त और क्षुद्र हैं
और चेहरा झाग की तरह है,
एक यहूदी भिक्षु,
हमारी कड़वाहट को आशीर्वाद दें,
किचन को सबसे अच्छा बनाएं
मौत को मिठास देना -
हमें मोम सिखाओ
और रोटी में हमारे बीज
मेरे दादाजी बैठे हैं
मेरा चचेरा भाई भरा हुआ है
मेरे मुँह में ऐश”
― Bert Meyers, In a Dybbuk's Raincoat: Collected Poems

“Nature is never the same twice; this inconsistency requires adaptability. There are limitless problems in the world. If we think like a machine we only find ourselves with the same problems. The problems are there because we haven't adapted a solution; the only way to find a solution is to think outside the machine.

This thinking is necessary to a natural food system. There are no two vegetables that are the same, no two days of cooking that are the same, no two humans that are the same. Industrial systems give us the same ingredients every day, through all the seasons. When you put square shapes in square spaces, you don't understand the circle.

Your thinking becomes linear and you can't adapt.

When you adapt, your mind is able to make connections and find solutions to the unpredictable nature of real food.”
― Douglas McMaster

“Nature is never the same twice; this inconsistency requires adaptability. There are limitless problems in the world. If we think like a machine we only find ourselves with the same problems. The problems are there because we haven't adapted a solution; the only way to find a solution is to think outside the machine.

This thinking is necessary to a natural food system.

There are no two vegetables that are the same, no two days of cooking that are the same, no two humans that are the same. Industrial systems give us the same ingredients every day, through all the seasons. When you put square shapes in square spaces, you don't understand the circle.

Your thinking becomes linear and you can't adapt.

When you adapt, your mind is able to make connections and find solutions to the unpredictable nature of real food.”
― Douglas McMaster, Silo: The Zero Waste Blueprint

“The state of our fire became as important to us as it must have been to a primitive tribe. When it sulked and sank we were filled with dismay; when it blazed all was well with the world; but if – God save us – it went out altogether, then we were clutched by primeval chills.”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“My happy place is you teaching me how to dance in the kitchen at two in the morning.”
― Lidia Longorio, Hey Humanity

“Not pausing, Justin grabbed my laptop and opened applications for me to return to college, the moon framed in our kitchen, winking in the window from behind a slate storm-cloud. He asked me questions from the forms aloud, marking my responses—applying me to schools in New York City.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“The kitchen is a pharmacy; whereas, it is also a poison-room; it depends on you that, what you make of it?”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Never show people your menu, for your kitchen will be replaced by a dump site, your mind.”
― Goitsemang Mvula