Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. "You should've told us," they'd say. "We would've helped you." You're not getting it, Neela and I thought. This is our party and you're not invited. To this day, the elder women of my household in Chennai still regard Neela or me with suspicion whenever we enter the kitchen to make anything other than tea. No matter that I host a cooking show or that Neela has raised two healthy daughters who clearly haven't starved or been disfigured by a kitchen accident.

Every so often I would look at my women friends who were happily married and didn't cook, and I would always find myself wondering how they did it. Would anyone love me if I couldn't cook? I always thought cooking was part of the package: Step right up, it's Rachel Samstat, she's bright, she's funny and she can cook!

If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.

The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging h

It was a fungal party hellscape.

But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greenie, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greenie clarify butter, wash rice, devein shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.

Calvin: Why are you crying mom?Mom: I'm cutting up an onion.Calvin: It must be hard to cook if you anthrpomorphisize your vegetables.

Nobody will buy a half-cooked food!

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

To make an omelette we have to break eggs.

Many a good drop of broth may come out of an old pot.

The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.

A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.

Let onions lurk within the bowl And, scarce-suspected, animate the whole

Bad cooks-and the utter lack of reason in the kitchen-have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.

Somewhere lives a bad Cajun cook, just as somewhere must live one last ivory-billed woodpecker. For me, I don't expect ever to encounter either one.

A good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger's end.

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

Cookery has become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.

The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.