Bill Buford quotes:

The skyline in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' is made up: no, you don't get the Waldorf and the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and a dozen other magnificent structures in one window.

Bahia is the Amazon's geographical next-of-kin: the same climate, forest canopy, diverse floor. But there is no wild cacao; the tree was introduced, most likely by a Frenchman, Louis Frederick Warneaux, who, in 1746, sowed seeds near one of Bahia's large rivers.

The commonplace about Italian cooking is that it's very simple; in practice, the simplicity needs to be learned, and the best way to learn it is to go to Italy and see it firsthand.

Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight.

The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the 'myth of Mario' was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

Gramercy Park is a four-acre square given in perpetuity to the residents surrounding it, 170 years ago, by Samuel Ruggles, a real estate developer of immoderate means.

Cable made the Food Network possible. It was invented in 1993 by Reese Schoenfeld, a co-founder of CNN, who was convinced that its natural audience was women - millions of them.

Most chartreuse recipes call for one bird, a fat one, like a pigeon or a partridge, secreted inside the casing, a vegetable mold, which is then turned out onto a plate.

I just believe people should know what they're eating.

People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.

When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits - melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet... I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead - a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated.

Tuscan sausages are smaller than their American cousins, each one demarcated with a string, a graceful loop drawn tightly into a knot - looping and tightening, looping and tightening, a symmetrically floppy, aesthetically appealing rhythm.

This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury's milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.

Rachael Ray is probably the most watched kitchen personality in the history of American television.

The first sign that I'd been unknowingly affected by cooking shows occurred on a Sunday morning when I realized I was talking to myself. I'd been making toast. 'First, we cut our bread,' I whispered. 'Do you know why?' I stopped what I was doing and looked up. 'Let me tell you why.'

Probably the single most important evolutionary trait dogs developed was right there at the outset, illuminated by the campfire. It is in those eyebrows and in the way dogs have of tilting their heads. They are warm packages of emotions.

You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.

I bashed myself. I cut myself. I caught on fire. I fell: I had been myopically focused on peeling garlic, and hadn't noticed a bin of beef at my feet until I walked into it.

Kasha is the hardy starch of a Slavic winter - buckwheat, in fact - but when cooked properly, it gets a nutty, deep-brown crust.

I didn't know why dessert was invented or what function it was meant to perform. Raising livestock and the harvesting of grains are ancient activities, but when did humankind decide it also needed creme brulee?

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.

The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of 'cocoa mass.'

Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301)

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'

The crowd is not us. It never is.

Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.