Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at
Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrées, the hors
d'oeuvres, and the things à la though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe and sane, and sure.
— Edna Ferber
Life is like preparing
food. It all depends on what you add and how you mix
it. Sometimes you follow the recipe and other times you decide to use
your creativity
to add more spice to the end result.
— Anon
Honesty is the best policy and spinach is the best vegetable.
— Popeye
Someone the other day told me that left-over wine could be used for
cooking. I was totally confused. What the heck is left-over wine?
— Unknown funny person
I am addicted to Nutella, the chocolate hazelnut spread?
I can't live without it. I need a daily dose of Nutella.
— Michelle Trachtenberg
To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a "home"
might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a
recreation.
— Emily Post
If cooking becomes an art form rather than a means of providing a reasonable diet, then something is
clearly wrong.
— Tom Jaine
We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without
heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without
books;
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.
— Owen Meredith
Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
— Peter De Vries
THE 2,000-YEAR-OLD MAN'S SECRETS OF LONGEVITY
1. Don't run for a bus — there'll always be another.
2. Never, ever touch fried food.
3. Stay out of a Ferrari or any other small Italian car.
4. Eat fruit — a nectarine — even a rotten plum is good.
— Mel Brooks
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
— George Orwell
Old people shouldn't eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.
— Robert Orben
Better a good dinner than a fine coat.
— French proverb
Be content to remember that those who can make omelettes properly can do nothing
else.
— Hilaire Belloc
Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French.
Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it
good.
— Alice May Brock
There is no such thing as a little garlic.
— A. Baer
What garlic is to food, insanity is to art.
— Augustus Saint-Gaudens
If you wish to grow thinner, diminish your dinner,
And take to light claret instead of pale ale;
Look down with an utter contempt upon butter,
And never touch bread till it's toasted — or stale
— H. S. Leigh (1837-83), English author
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
— American Proverb
Shake and shake
The catsup bottle,
None will come,
And then a lot'll.
— Richard Armour
I know a man who gave up smoking, drinking,
sex, and rich food. He was healthy right up to the time he killed himself.
— Johnny Carson
You won't be surprised that diseases are innumerable — count the cooks.
— Seneca
Wedding-reception food, whether served at tables or presented at a buffet,
should be stuff that's easy to throw up, like spaghetti.
— P. J. O'Rourke
It's all right, the white wine came up with the fish.
— Herman J. Mankiewicz, after having left a formal dinner table to be
sick
Cheese it is a peevish elf. It digests all things but itself.
— John Ray
Hate turnips and successful people? — You likely need serious
therapy but at least the turnips are happy!
— Dave Erhard
The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
— Thomas Love Peacock
The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.
— Alexander Pope
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate.
— Emily Dickinson
A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he
does of his dinner.
— Samuel Johnson
A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne,
the only true feminine & becoming viands.
— Lord Byron
When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than
sex.
— Prue Leith
'Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical
atoms.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of
cooking dinner for someone she loves.
— Thomas Wolfe
I once came across a fellow lightworker who clearly had a
food addiction, and she is also a channel. And what she said was very interesting — that in order to
channel well she needs a big body. She believed this to be true and so gave rational-lies that it is ok to
indulge because this will help in her work. This was many years ago so I don't know if she has since woken
up to the truth in herself. For her sake and for the sake of those she serves, I hope so. I share this
story to illustrate that our minds can be a weapon of destruction if we do not master it.
— Shamala Tan
To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomatist — the problem is entirely the same in
both cases. To know exactly how much oil one must put with one's vinegar.
— Oscar Wilde
Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of
men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who
knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?
— G. C. Lichtenberg
It just proves that fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong. They eat horses instead
of ride them.
— Cole Porter
If you don't know whether a mushroom is edible or not, you cook it all up,
and you take a little bit and then you leave it until the next day and watch to see if there are any bad
effects. If there aren't any, you eat a little more, and presently you know something.
— John Cage
Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
— Ludwig van Beethoven
If you would eat well in England, you must eat breakfast three times a
day.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.
— Cyril Connolly, British journalist and writer
When I ask for a watercress sandwich, I do not mean a loaf with a field in
the middle of it.
— Oscar Wilde
Heaven sends us good meat, but the Devil sends cooks.
— David Garrick
Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
— Mark Twain
Bud Light.
— Keith Tkachuk, St. Louis Blues hockey player, when asked to name his
favorite sports drink
I don't order fries with my club sandwich.
— Mario Lemiex of Pittsburg Penguins, in reply to how he stays in shape in the off
season
Louise doesn't claim to be anything of a cook ... She really doesn't see eye to eye
with a stove at all.
— Alan Ayckbourn
Take away that pudding — it has no theme.
— Winston Churchill
The one way to get thin is to
re-establish a purpose in life.
— Cyril Connolly, British journalist and writer
A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something
Brussels sprouts never do.
— P. J. O'Rourke
The best number for a dinner party is two — myself and a dam' good
head waiter.
— Nubar Gulbenkian, British oil tycoon and socialite
To eat is human, to digest divine.
— Charles T. Copeland
Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is
great.
— Henry IV, King of France
After dinner sit awhile, after supper walk a mile.
— English proverb
Short men eat more than tall men.
— French proverb
Don't eat too many almonds; they add weight to the breasts.
— Colette
Conversation did not flow with the drink; it drowned in it.
— Quentin Crisp
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
— Oscar Wilde
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
— W. Somerset Maugham
The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese
imperial funeral.
— Simon Hoggart
This was a good enough dinner, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.
— Samuel Johnson
Any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers
not in it.
— Nora Ephron
A vegetarian is a person who won't eat anything that can have children.
— David Brenner
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones
with"; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of
bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his
lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
— Henry David Thoreau
My favorite animal is steak.
— Fran Lebowitz
Steer clear of restaurants with an attitude.
— Dave Erhard
Steer clear of restaurants that rotate.
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.
— Shirley Conrad
Drink champagne for no reason at all.
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.
— Samuel Johnson
It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or
worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful.
Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be
scullions.
— Saint Francis de Sales (1567-1622)
You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and
good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly
developed.
— Saki
A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true
feminine & becoming viands.
— Lord Byron
Eating is not merely a material pleasure. Eating well gives a spectacular
joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the
morale.
— Elsa Schiaparelli
Americans can eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup, mustard, chili sauce,
Tabasco sauce, cayenne pepper, or any other condiment which destroys the original flavor of the dish
— Henry Miller
I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and
people like that.
— Oscar Wilde
Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians — except for the occasional mountain lion
steak.
— Ted Nugent
Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?
— Unknown wise person
Why is it that when vegetarians come to you, you're expected to provide
food for them, but if you went to their house you'd never say, "I can't eat this muck. Would you
grill me a thick steak?".
— Simon Hoggart, columnist with The Guardian
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
— Anon
Of soup and love, the first is the best.
— Thomas Fuller
Soup is just a way of screwing you out of a meal.
— Jay Leno
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
— Virginia Woolf
It if tastes good, it's trying to kill you.
— Roy Qualley
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing never to
put it in a fruit salad.
— Unknown wise person
There are nine ways of poaching eggs, and each of them is worse than the other.
— Robert Lynd
Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of
one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like — and during
the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.
— Saki
We could not have had a better dinner had there been a Synod of Cooks.
— Samuel Johnson
A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and
then thrown out, as good for nothing.
— Samuel Johnson
I never see an egg brought on my table but I feel penetrated with the wonderful change it would have
undergone but for my gluttony; it might have been a gentle useful hen, leading her chickens with a care and
vigilance which speaks shame to many women.
— St John de Crevecoeur
Lunch is on me.
— Brendan Shanahan, Hockey Player with Detroit Red Wings, after signing a $26-Million
Contract
It's a wery remarkable circumstance ... that poverty and oysters always seem to go together.
— Charles Dickens
I did toy with the idea of doing a cook-book . . . The recipes were to be
the routine ones: how to make dry toast, instant coffee, hearts of lettuce and brownies. But as an
added attraction, at no extra charge, my idea was to put a fried egg on the cover. I think a lot of people
who hate literature but love fried eggs would buy it if the price was right.
— Groucho Marx
Long as there is chicken and gravy on your rice Ev'rything is nice.
— Johnny Mercer
Please, sir, I want some more.
— Charles Dickens
I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.
— Katherine Cebrian
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.
— Sydney Smith
People often feed the hungry so that nothing may disturb their own
enjoyment of a good meal.
— W. Somerset Maugham
The healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
— Samuel Butler
Cannibalism went right out as soon as the American canned food came
in.
— Stephen Leacock
Like cannibalism, a matter of taste.
— G. K. Chesterton
Last night we went to a Chinese dinner at six and
a French dinner at nine, and I can feel the sharks' fins navigating unhappily in the Burgundy.
— Peter Fleming
Beulah, peel me a grape.
— Mae West in the 1933 film I'm No Angel
The tragedy of English cooking is that 'plain' cooking cannot be entrusted to 'plain' cooks.
— Countess Morphy
Look here, Steward, if this is coffee, I want tea; but if this is tea,
then I wish for coffee.
— Punch
The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as good cooks go, she went.
— Saki
You know that really was quite the most appalling meal I've ever tasted. I'd forgotten how bad she was.
Burnt Earl Grey omelettes. It's almost an art form to mistreat food in that way.
— Alan Ayckbourn
Subdue your appetites my dears, and you've conquered human natur.
— Charles Dickens
It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is "soporific".
— Beatrix Potter
Plant carrots in January and you will never have to eat carrots.
— Unknown wise person
Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, and so sparkling that you scarcely notice the
bitter in it.
— Charles Dudley Warner
Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied
by a good cut of meat.
— Fran Lebowitz
The best peas are the smallest peas and ... the sleaziest peas are the best peas.
— Waveley E. Root
Artichokes ... are just plain annoying.... After all the trouble you go
to, you get about as much actual "food" out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking thirty or
forty postage stamps. Have the shrimp cocktail instead.
— "Miss Piggy"
Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state
religion.
— Ambrose Bierce in The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary
[Seaweed's] only natural enemies are children, who try to turn it into weather-forecasting devices, and
the Welsh, who try to turn it into bread. Both attempts are disastrously unsuccessful.
— Miles Kington
You don't get tired of muffins, but you don't find inspiration in
them.
— George Bernard Shaw
[Cheese is] milk's leap toward immortality.
— Clifton Fadiman
Mustard's no good without roast beef.
— Chico Marx
Watermelon — it's a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face.
— Enrico Caruso
Parsley Is gharsley.
— Ogden Nash
Salad. I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know. Have
you noticed? You start one side of your plate and by the time you've got to the other, there's a fresh crop
of lettuce taken root and sprouted up.
— Alan Ayckbourn
Botticelli isn't a wine, you Juggins! Botticelli's a cheese!
— Punch
You like potato and I like po-tah-to,
You like tomato and I like to-mah-to;
Potato, po-tah-to, tomato, to-mah-to
Let's call the whole thing off!
— Ira Gershwin, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off
When the Reverend Mr. Dumfarthing sternly refused tea as a'pernicious drink weakening to the system, the
Anglican rector was too ignorant of the presbyterian system to know well enough to give him Scotch
whisky.
— Stephen Leacock
Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what's for lunch.
— Orson Wells
And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I
think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
— Virginia Woolf
Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least.
Cocoa is a cad and coward
Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
— G. K. Chesterton
Come in, or we will both starve.
— Sign in restaurant window
`But why should you want to shield him?' cried Egbert; `the man is a common murderer.' `A common
murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook.'
— Saki
The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into
the mezzanine floor.
— P. G. Wodehouse
The ham roll consisted of greasy pie dough of the sort contained in five-cent pork pies. Imbedded
rubber-like in this were strips of fried ham tasting slightly of kerosine. Over the pasty lay an inch of
Dole's Hawaiian shredded pineapple. The vegetables were a stone-cold, glass-hard roast potato, some
billiard-green string beans out of a can and floating in a water sauce, and two spoonfuls of tuna-fish
salad using hemp instead of lettuce.
— S. J. Perelman
I brought buckets of caviare and asked all the greediest people I know.
They sat in a holy circle and never spoke to me once, except to say, in loud asides, that the others were
making pigs of themselves.
— Nancy Mitford, in a letter about her trip to Russia
We lived for days on nothing but food and water.
— W. C. Fields
I'll take a lemonade — in a dirty glass!
— Bob Hope in 1946 film Road to Utopia
Where there's smoke, there's toast.
— Unknown wise person
The dinner was: cold TINNED ham and cold hard mince pies. Then we sang carols which was rather fun I'm
bound to say. Bring me flesh and bring me wine. Poor Maurice's tenor boomed in vain-not a drop.
— Nancy Mitford
The test of a cook is how she boils an egg. My boiled eggs are FANTASTIC,
FABULOUS. Sometimes as hard as a too carat diamond, or again soft as a feather bed, or running like a
cooling stream, they can also burst like fireworks from their shells and take on the look and rubbery
texture of a baby octopus. Never a dull egg, with me.
— Nancy Mitford
Sue wants a barbecue, Sam wants to boil a ham, Grace votes for bouillabaisse stew, Jake wants a
weeny-bake, steak and a layer cake, He'll get a tummy ache too.
— Johnny Mercer
There is no danger of my getting scurvy [while in England], as I have to
consume at least two gin-and-limes every evening to keep the cold out.
— S. J. Perelman
And the sooner the tea's out of the way, the sooner we can get out the gin, eh?
— Henry Reed
Dinner at the Huntercombes' possessed only two dramatic features — the
wine was a farce — and the food a tragedy.
— Anthony Powell
Have an egg roll, Mr Goldstone,
Have a napkin, have a chopstick, have a chair! Have a sparerib, Mr Goldstone
Any sparerib that I can spare, I'd be glad to share!
— Stephen Sondheim
OSCAR: I got brown sandwiches and green sandwiches... Well, what do you say?
MURRAY: What's the green?
OSCAR: It's either very new cheese or very old meat.
— Neil Simon
Lunch Hollywood-style — a hot dog and vintage wine.
— Harry Kurnitz
What I always say about your salads, Annie, is that I may not enjoy eating
them but I learn an awful lot about insect biology.
— Alan Ayckbourn
`Can I have a table near the floor.
`Certainly, I'll have the waiter saw the legs off.'
— Groucho Marx
BRENDA: It's all sort of gritty this sandwich.
RALPH: Gritty, is it? Never mind, it's probably been dropped somewhere. It's good for you, grit. They give
it to hens.
— Alan Ayckbourn
Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting
Easter.
— Fran Lebowitz
A number of other remarkable things show up in holiday dinners, such as... pies made out of something
called "mince", although if anyone has ever seen a mince in its natural state he did not live to tell about
it.
— P. J. O'Rourke
As to those who can find it in them to employ the doubtlessly useful word `brunch', do they, I wonder,
ever up-grade it to `bruncheon': This is the kind of question that I ponder on while waiting for the kettle
to boil. The active mind is never at rest.
— Arthur Marshall
I could never understand what Sir Godfrey Tearle saw in Jill Bennett, until I saw her at the Caprice
eating cornon-the-cob.
— Coral Browne
Never serve oysters in a month that has no paycheck in it.
— P. J. O'Rourke
Boiled lamb brisket... is either the national dish or just what everything in Australia tastes like.
— P. J. O'Rourke
[England] is the only country in the world where the food is more dangerous than sex. I mean, a hard
cheese will kill you, but a soft cheese will kill you in seconds.
— Jackie Mason
My grandmother... about as bad a cook as you can be without actually being hazardous.
— Bill Bryson
At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely.
— W. Somerset Maugham
Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake in the afternoon.
— Jill Cooper
Warm the pot first ... then put two heaping teaspoonfuls in the pot-no bags-in boiling water, and when
it's in, stir it.
— Lynn Fontanne
If you run across a restaurant where you often see priests eating with
priests, or sporting girls with sporting girls, you may be confident that it is good. Those are two classes
of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth.
— A. J. Liebling
Contrary to popular notion, truck drivers know nothing about good restaurants. If you want a reliable
tip, drive into a town, go to the nearest appliance store, and seek out the dishwasher repair man. He
spends a lot of time in restaurant kitchens and usually has strong opinions about them.
— Bryan Miller
Never eat in a restaurant that's over a hundred feet off the ground and won't stand still.
— Calvin Trillin
Never trust the food in a restaurant on top of the tallest building in town that spends a lot of time
folding napkins.
— Andy Rooney
Never order anything that isn't fried from a waitress named Mabel; never take the last donut in the
display case.
— Flip Spiceland
Never eat Chinese food in Oklahoma.
— David Bryon
When it comes to Chinese food ... the less known about the preparation the
better.
— Calvin Trillin
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
— G. K. Chesterton
Never eat more than you can lift.
— "Miss Piggy"
Eat less than you think you want, eat with your intelligence, not your stomach. Never get up from the
table with an inward, silent apology for being a pig.
— Coco Chanel
Never commit yourself to a cheese without having first examined
it.
— T. S. Eliot
Coffee, though a useful medicine, if drunk constantly will at length induce a decay of health, and
hectic fever.
— Jesse Torrey
While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased
to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of
pork.
— Fran Lebowitz
Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.
— Mark Twain
Cheese and salt meat should be sparingly eat.
— Benjamin Franklin
What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not
necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey, or the guinea hen.
— Alice B. Toklas
Don't salt other people's food.
— Bulgarian Proverb
Serve Coke or RC with meat; 7-Up or Sprite with fish, Dr. Pepper with game
...
— Calvin Trill
The proper way to cook a cockatoo is to put the bird and an axhead into a
billy. Boil them until the axhead is soft. The cockatoo is then ready to eat.
— Anonymous
If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that,
mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried
potatoes are out.
— Jean Kerr
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your
plate.
— Thornton Wilder
Eat to live, live not to eat. Three good meals a day is bad living.
— Benjamin Franklin
I love eating in restaurants but it doesn't beat a home-cooked meal. Even if it's a burned grilled
cheese sandwich, it's my own grilled cheese sandwich. Nothing compares to that.
— Jack Frost, alias for a restaurant critic and AAA publishing editor
Dine with little, sup with less: do better still: sleep supperless.
— Benjamin Franklin
To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.
— Benjamin Franklin
Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.
— Benjamin Franklin
Hold your counsel before dinner; the full belly hates thinking as well as acting.
— Benjamin Franklin
All the Coffee in Columbia Won't Make Me a Morning Person!
— Bumper Sticker
MEAT IS MURDER: Tasty, tasty murder!
— Bumper Sticker
Cops Do It — With Donuts!
— Bumper Sticker
You Wanna Pizza Me?
— Bumper Sticker
I Love Animals — They Taste Great!
— Bumper Sticker
What good are vitamins? Eat four lobsters, eat a pound of caviar —
live! If you are in love with a beautiful blonde with an empty face and no brain at all, don't
be afraid, marry her — live!
— Arthur Rubinstein
