Laurie Colwin Quotations

We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.

I come from a coffee-loving family, and you can always tell when my sister and I have been around, because both of us collect all the dead coffee from everyone's morning cup, pour it over ice, and drink it. This is a disgusting habit.

Provision as much pure and organic food as you can, and let the rest go by.

The fact is that modern life has deprived us of life's one great luxury: time.

Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.

As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical.

The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: even the simplest food is a gift.

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life.

When it comes to cakes and puddings, savouries, bread and tea cakes, the English cannot be surpassed.

One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

Certainly, cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.

Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.

It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

I myself am not particularly interested in restaurant cooking. I don't really want to learn how to make a napoleon. I'd much rather learn how to make a very good lemon cake, which you can make in your own home. I like plain, old-fashioned home food.

Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that.

We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living.

It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else.

The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone's knee.

I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook.

I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in.

My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me.

Somehow or other, I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd.

The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people.

Unlike some people, who love to go out, I love to stay home.

That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional.

It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called social life.

Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you.

[On television:] It's made people moronic, it's robbed people of their ability to think. It's done tremendous damage, and every single household that has a small child should take it and throw it out the window.

No one who cooks cooks alone.

I was taught in my Introduction to Anthropology [course in college], it is not just the great works of [hu]mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

There is really a je ne sais quoi about turkey cooking - the air of festivity, the family squabbles, the constant basting - that does not apply to the turkey breast, which is, really, a convenience of food... A turkey without seasonal angst is like a baseball game without a national anthem, a winter without snow, a birthday party without candles.

Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal,

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.

For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.

On Saturday mornings I would walk to the Flavor Cup or Puerto Rico Importing coffee store to get my coffee. Often it was freshly roasted and the beans were still warm. Coffee was my nectar and my ambrosia: I was very careful about it. I decanted my beans into glass...and I ground them in little batches in my grinder.

Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

When life is hard and the day has been long, the ideal dinner is not four perfect courses, each in a lovely pool of sauce whose ambrosial flavors are like nothing ever before tasted, but rather something comforting and savory, easy on the digestion - something that makes one feel, if even for only a minute, that one is safe.

In this world of uncertainty and woe, one thing remains unchanged: Fresh, canned, pureed, dried, salted, sliced, and served with sugar and cream, or pressed into juice, the tomato is reliable, friendly, and delicious. We would be nothing without it.

It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.

The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people.

The sharing of food is the basis of social life, and to many people it is the only kind of social life worth participating in.

I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.

Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures.

Lentils are friendly - the Miss Congeniality of the bean world.

When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook's strongest ally. I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over, I ate it cold the next day on bread.

I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato.

When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook's strongest ally....

Cookbooks hit you where you live. You want comfort; you want security; you want food; you want to not be hungry and not only do you want those basic things fixed, you want it done in a really nice, gentle way that makes you feel loved. That's a big desire, and cookbooks say to the person reading them, 'If you will read me, you will be able to do this for yourself and for others. You will make everybody feel better.'

Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.

There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.

A person cooking is a person giving. Even the simplest food is a gift.

To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.

Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed.

And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

People who like to cook like to talk about food....without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.