There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.
There are may of us who cannot but feel dismal about the future of various cultures. Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment.
A pleasant aperitif, as well as a good chaser for a short quick whiskey, as well again for a fine supper drink, is beer.
One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.
But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence.
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
I notice that as I get rid of the protective covering of the middle years, I am more openly amused and incautious and less careful socially, and that all this makes for increasingly pleasant contacts with the world.
Digestion is one of the most delicately balanced of all human and perhaps angelic functions.
It is impossible to think of any good meal, no matter how plain or elegant, without soup or bread in it.
I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.
At present, I myself do not know of any local witches or warlocks, but there are several people who seem to have an uncanny power over food.
When shall we live if not now?
All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are rich or poor.
Family dinners are more often than not an ordeal of nervous indigestion, preceded by hidden resentment and ennui and accompanied by psychosomatic jitters.
I like old people when they have aged well. And old houses with an accumulation of sweet honest living in them are good. And the timelessness that only the passing of Time itself can give to objects both inside and outside the spirit is a continuing reassurance.
Good wine, well drunk, can lend majesty to the human spirit.
A complete lack of caution is perhaps one of the true signs of a real gourmet...
It must not simply be taken for granted that a given set of ill-assorted people, for no other reason than because it is Christmas, will be joyful to be reunited and to break bread together.
Brioches are a light, pale yellow, faintly sweet kind of muffin with a characteristic blob on top, rather like a mushroom just pushing crookedly through the ground. Once eaten in Paris, they never taste as good anywhere else.
This is not that, and that is certainly not this, and at the same time an oyster stew is not stewed, and although they are made of the same things and even cooked almost the same way, an oyster soup should never be called a stew, nor stew soup.