Simple Cooking Quotes

“I don’t know about you, but the general images I have for the cooking of the last century in this country are two: on the one hand, a “homespun” frontier cuisine of at best limited, rough, and honest fare (mostly pork, corn, and whiskey); on the other, the vulgar, ostentatious but naive gorgings of such as Diamond Jim Brady, who once swore he would eat a Turkish towel if it were dipped in the right sauce. Mary Randolph gives the lie to this condescending fiction: her cooking is profoundly sensual and moral.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“Karen Hess, the editor, is this country’s culinary conscience”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“Recipes are made by breaking down a complex relationship of smell, touch, taste, and instinct born of intimate familiarity into a series of minimal commands containing none of those things.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“What we keep finding out again and again is that recipe cooking is to real cooking as painting by number is to real painting: just pretend. The problem is that we don’t seem to be able to grasp it. We keep trying—with a different cookbook.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“It’s at this point—the purchase—as you may know, that the problem begins. The book is excellent, yes, but the author and the cuisine remain on one side of the page and I on the other. All I get are the recipes. And what I’ve found—and it’s been a painfully long time learning—is that recipes without the author, without the cuisine to which they were once a living, seamless part, die. Or, rather, become no more and no less than any other recipe.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“Americans, more than any other culture on the earth, are cookbook cooks; we learn to make our meals not from any oral tradition, but from a text. The just-wed cook brings to the new household no carefully copied collection of the family’s cherished recipes, but a spanking new edition of Fannie Farmer or The Joy of Cooking. No doubt this has its good points, but the drawbacks are many. Not only is our nation’s cooking far more homogenized than needs be (a benefit mostly to giant food conglomerates), but it is robbed of the lip-smacking appreciation of the sensuality of eating, something very few cookbooks are able—and no basic cookbook even attempts—to share.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“The most popular Mediterranean tomato salad, found from Spain to Turkey, is a combination of roughly cut chunks of tomato tossed in a bowl with small pieces of sweet onion (a red salad onion will do nicely, although a specialty onion like the Vidalia is a special treat here), dressed with a good fruity olive oil and some freshly squeezed lemon (or lime) juice, and that grinding of pepper. This, too, should be put aside for an hour or so to let the flavors mingle … and salted only at the last moment.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“So it is, while Southerners form societies to preserve the perfection of black-eyed peas and argue vehemently the merits of ham bone versus pickled pork in red beans and rice, the mention of succotash stirs less excitement in the Yankee heart than finding a dime in a pay-phone coin return. The best New England can offer by way of chauvinistic boasting about the stuff comes from the diary of a Vermont farmer, whose single culinary reference for an entire year was a laconic “This day I din’d upon Succotash” (quoted by Evan Jones in American Food).”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“American cooking was once a patchwork quilt of tiny, idiosyncratic cuisines, where each separate community worked its personal touch on what were then our common foodstuffs—mostly game, pork, poultry, com, and the produce of the kitchen garden—making a wealth of related but dissimilar dishes with homely names like holy pokes, huffjuffs, and Baptist bread. When we all got connected together, these dishes were merged and homogenized, subtle distinctions were first muddied and then lost entirely.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“Originally, Fannie Farmer used 1/3 cup of sugar. This amount has crept up over the years, even though apples get sweeter and sweeter: 1/2 cup should be plenty.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“when industrial genius introduced a commercial baking powder just before the Civil War, America—and especially rural America—went biscuit mad. At last, fresh, hot-from-the-oven bread could be set on the breakfast or dinner table without the delicate, time-consuming processes required by salt- and yeast-raised breads. And at some point late last century, “shortcake” just came to mean the richest-tasting biscuit possible. Echoes of old-time biscuit-making ring loudest in Southern cooking, which has proven most resistant to change. Beaten biscuits, buttermilk biscuits, soda biscuits … mention these to a Southerner raised in time for World War II and you will stimulate memories of a whole cuisine—biscuits for breakfast with butter and cane molasses, with pork drippings or red-eye gravy, or just tucked cold in the pocket for a between-meal snack.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking

“Cookbooks can be wonderfully entertaining and informative, but I don’t like having to bring them with me to the stove. My goal as a cook has always been not so much to attain some specific sense of mastery as to be able to just go into the kitchen, take up what I find there, and make a meal of it.”
― John Thorne, Simple Cooking