Top 33 Cookbook Quotes

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

I’m a great cook. People have asked me to do a cookbook.

I’m not the singing cookbook lady.

I’ve seen cookbooks from lots of great chefs that have been disappointing. A book, to me, it has to have a story. Some of these people, they open a restaurant, and one year later, there’s a cookbook. There’s not much of a story yet.

I didn’t want to write a cheffy cookbook with dehydrated ham chips.

Nowadays, everyone writes a cookbook. Models, singers, whatever, everybody thinks that they can do it and cook on TV. What they don’t understand is that if you want to do it well, you need to put in the hours.

I had been blogging for a few years when Jonah Straus, my now-literary agent, reached out to see if I’d consider writing a cookbook. At the time, I didn’t feel ready; I was still getting adjusted to life in the upper Midwest, and I was still finding my recipe voice.

I’m a huge cook! I’m actually trying to write my first cookbook. I make an Indian-spice Bolognese and serve it over pasta. It’s a combination of flavors that people aren’t used to.

A formative cookbook for me was Nigella Lawson’s ‘How to Eat.’ Its warm, conversational tone is wonderful.

When we first did ‘Modernist Cuisine,’ I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, ‘This is insane.’

I will not allow a Delia Smith cookbook in my house! It’s all so precise with Delia, and it makes cooking seem so inaccessible.

I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.

I met Charlie Trotter before I actually saw him in person; I was 24 when I first opened the pages of Charlie’s cookbook ‘Charlie Trotter’s’ and was greeted by a man I would know and admire for the next 20 years.

Once you make a cookbook, you live with it as your own for the rest of your life, like a yearbook.

We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it.

I’ve been thinking about a cookbook. I’ve been making notes and promising myself I’ll do it some day. I have an idea for a cookbook and music together.

In my ‘Big Dinners’ cookbook, I recreated my mother’s recipe for crab dip. The creamy dressing for this dip, made with mayonnaise, tomato paste, a touch of honey, sliced chives, lemon juice and zest, horseradish and Tabasco, is reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing.

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities.

Recipes are important but only to a point. What’s more important than recipes is how we think about food, and a good cookbook should open up a new way of doing just that.

I love ‘The Gourmet Cooking School Cookbook’ by Dione Lucas. A huge source of information and inspiration. The book is organized by menu, and the recipes are unusual and exciting.

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

Every cookbook can be a bit patronising.

I’m doing something with Kris Jenner’s cookbook. We’e going to do a whole week of my favourite stuff because everybody knows I love to eat. Her lemon cake is so insane. I hate lemon and when I go to her house I eat lemon cake. There’s nothing better.

I love cookbooks. I certainly have my fair share at home, but I’m a really funny cookbook person: I don’t really ever cook out of cookbooks. I like cookbooks for the commentary or the pictures or the history.

I would like to, at some point, do a cookbook.

‘Outlaw Cook’ was a revelation. Folks like Jeff Smith and Marcella Hazan got me interested in cooking, but John Thorne pushed me into the path that I follow to this day. This is the only cookbook I’ve ever read that understands how men really eat: over the sink, in the dark, greasy to the elbows.

My husband wrote me love letters while I was on location in Canada and pregnant. They turned into being about food, and it turned it into a cookbook. He called it ‘The Tuscan Cookbook for the Pregnant Male.’ It was kind of genius. When I took it a book agent, he was like, ‘Men don’t buy cookbooks.’

Now the look of the book dictates the sale. In my day you could still buy a good cookbook in paperback with no pictures at all. I doubt if that would sell today. But those books were much used: they lived in the kitchen and got splattered with custard and gravy.

My most cherished possessions are my grandma’s letters and my vintage Martha Washington cookbook.

So my brain started ticking and I bought all my books from a cookbook shop, Libraire Gourmand in Paris. I bought them over the Internet and they sent them from France. I got the ‘Larousse’ in a box with 20 other books. I was pretty excited. It was like Christmas for 20 years.

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, and the wisdom of cookbook writers.

One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It’s what I did with my cookbook, frankly.

The difference between ‘Molto Italiano’ and ‘The Babbo Cookbook’ is that the ingredient lists in ‘Molto’ are about half or even a third the size. In ‘Babbo,’ they are very long, they are very real. That’s exactly how we make them in the restaurant.