French Food Quotes

#1. To the chefs who pioneered the nouvelle cuisine in France, the ancienne cuisine they were rebelling against looked timeless, primordial, old as the hills. But the cookbook record proves that the haute cuisine codified early in this century by Escoffier barely goes back to Napoleon's time. Before that, French food is not recognizable as French to modern eyes. Europe's menu before 1700 was completely different from its menu after 1800, when national cuisines arose along with modern nations and national cultures. #Quote by Raymond Sokolov

#2. I didn't understand for a long time, but what attracted me to MtAoFC [Mastering the Art of French Cooking] was the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it. I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility. #Quote by Julie Powell

#3. Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise is simplicity itself to make; no different, essentially, from Poulet Sauté, and no different, especially, from Bifteck Sauté Bercy. In fact, making it that night felt like falling into a time warp- I stood before the stove, melting butter and browning meat and smelling the smells of wine deglazing and shallots softening- but the dishes changed before my eyes, and I heard Julia warbling, "Boeuf Bourguignon is the same as Coq au Vin. You can use lamb, you can use veal, you can use pork.... #Quote by Julie Powell

#4. For me to go casual is not to go simple. To me, it is to be able to bring back the art of tradition and the soul of French food and my interpretation of that. #Quote by Daniel Boulud

#5. Years later, when Julia was famous she would often receive letters from people who asked not simply how they might learn to cook. They already knew the answer: The owned her cookbooks, but they were yearning to know how they might become passionate about it. She always answered the same thing: Go to France and eat. #Quote by Karen Karbo

#6. With a palate as unrefined as mine I can't taste any difference between this French food and what we had at that sleazy bar I got into trouble for inviting you to. To someone like me, they taste equally good. I know you disdain me for that. But the truth is, I take pride in that very fact, and I disdain you for disdaining me. I wonder if you take my point. Think about it in this regard: Which of us is constrained and which of us is free? Which is happy and which feels his hands are tied? Which is tranquil and which one wavers? As I see it, you're always unsteady on your legs. You can't find your courage. You'll go to any length to avoid what displeases you, and you gallop after whatever you want. And why is that? There is no why; it's because you're free to. You enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing because you have the latitude. #Quote by Natsume Sōseki

#7. Soon, things were heating up in the kitchen. The first course was a variation on a French recipe that had been around since Escoffier, Baccala Brandade. Angelina created a silky forcemeat with milk, codfish, olive oil, pepper, and slow-roasted garlic, a drizzle of lemon juice, and a shower of fresh parsley, then served it as a dip with sliced sourdough and warmed pita-bread wedges, paired with glasses of bubbly Prosecco.
The second course had been a favorite of her mother's called Angels on Horseback- freshly shucked oysters, wrapped in thin slices of prosciutto, then broiled on slices of herb-buttered bread. When the oysters cooked, they curled up to resemble tiny angels' wings. Angelina accented the freshness of the oyster with a dab of anchovy paste and wasabi on each hors d'oeuvre. She'd loved the Angels since she was a little girl; they were a heavenly mouthful.
This was followed by a Caesar salad topped with hot, batter-dipped, deep-fried smelts. Angelina's father used to crunch his way through the small, silvery fish like French fries. Tonight, Angelina arranged them artfully around mounds of Caesar salad on each plate and ushered them out the door.
For the fifth course, Angelina had prepared a big pot of her Mediterranean Clam Soup the night before, a lighter version of Manhattan clam chowder. The last two courses were Parmesan-Stuffed Poached Calamari over Linguine in Red Sauce, and the piece de resistance, Broiled Flounder with a Coriander Reduction. #Quote by Brian O'Reilly

#8. I suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject. The best way to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food- the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals. #Quote by Julia Child

#9. The image foreigners have of French cuisine is fattening and very fancy food. But it's not true - French food isn't just rich. The word "healthy" doesn't exist in French. We have many, many words, but not that one. To me, healthy means paying close attention to feeding people. #Quote by Alain Ducasse

#10. It has been a long time since I've been in France. I miss the food like a phantom limb.'
...
'I shall bring you our best dishes,' he promised.
'And the wine to pair with them, she said.
He feigned exasperation. 'But of course, he said, 'would I blaspheme?' ...
She ate, her eyes half closed. All along, she'd known Lotto was with her, across the table, enjoying her food with her. He would've loved this night. Her dress, the food, the wind. The lust welled in her until it was almost unbearable. If she looked up, she knew she would see only an empty chair. She would not look up. #Quote by Lauren Groff

#11. The good thing about starting your Thanksgiving feast with Oeufs en Gelée is that everything afterward is going to taste pretty goddamned great by comparison, and by the time we'd gotten through the gorgeously crisp and moist goose, the prunes stuffed with duck liver mousse, the cabbage with chestnuts, the green beans, and the creamed onions, aspic was largely forgotten, and we didn't even mind much that I had begun the Thanksgiving preparations with the absolutely insane idea that I would make chocolate soufflé for dessert once we were finished with dinner. This, of course, being the delusion of a diseased mind. #Quote by Julie Powell

#12. The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite," observed John Sanderson. "We demolish dinner, they eat it." The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was "in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce ... the lightest and most agreeable food." The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the "effect. #Quote by David McCullough

#13. Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France. #Quote by Ashley Warlick

#14. The French and their food. They put each meal on a pedestal. #Quote by Giada De Laurentiis

#15. The chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#16. Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks. #Quote by Will Durant

#17. Honey comes out of the air At early dawn the leaves of trees are found bedewed with honey. Whether this is the perspiration of the sky or a sort of saliva of the stars, or the moisture of the air purging itself, nevertheless it brings with it the great pleasure of its heavenly nature. It is always of the best quality when it is stored in the best flowers. #Quote by Pliny The Elder

#18. I am dismayed to be in season. I curse men who think of me as food and dream of rickshaws, and lacquered wood. #Quote by Andre Alexis

#19. They" hate us because they feel--and "they" are not wrong--that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. We do this by, for example, demonizing tobacco as poison here while promoting cigarettes in Asia; inflating produce prices by paying farmers not to grow food as millions go hungry worldwide; skimping on quality and then imposing tariffs on foreign products made better or cheaper than our own; padding corporate profits through Third World sweatshops; letting drug companies stand by as millions die of AIDS in Africa to keep prices up on lifesaving drugs; and on and on.

We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to one.

We even do it in our own country. Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant book Nickel and Dimed describes the impossibility of living with dignity or comfort as one of the millions of minimum-wage workers in fast food, aisle-stocking and table-waiting jobs. Their labor for next to nothing ensures that well-off people can be a little more pampered.

So if we do it to our own, what chance do foreigners have? #Quote by Bill Maher

#20. We want to live as people chosen, blessed, and broken, and thus become food for the world. #Quote by Henri J.M. Nouwen

#21. And, of course, the funniest food: "kumquats". I don't even bring them home anymore. I sit there laughing and they go to waste. #Quote by George Carlin

#22. 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. #Quote by Saint Francis De Sales

#23. True, most married men are convinced that their lives are dedicated to the family, and from a material standpoint this might be true. But it takes more than food in the fridge and two cars in the garage to keep a family going. #Quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#24. He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake. #Quote by Raymond Chandler

#25. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his
trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of
every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred
per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw
no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very
clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there
were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more
food. #Quote by George Orwell

#26. Will you kiss my envelopes before you mail them?"
"Will you give me my job back if I say yes?" He gestured towards the doorway to her old office.
"It's all yours. #Quote by Kitty French

#27. As I began to love myself I freed myself of anything that is no good for my health - food, people, things, situations, and everything that drew me down and away from myself. At first I called this attitude a healthy egoism. Today I know it is Love of Oneself. #Quote by Charlie Chaplin

#28. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#29. The comeback of true green olives was part of a Spanish food revival in the early 2000s. I credit Sam and Sam Clark of Moro Restaurant in London with making them cool again. #Quote by Bee Wilson

#30. Today, we ask not what we can do for our country but what our country, employer, fast-food purveyor, or favorite airline can do for us. #Quote by Moises Naim

#31. Eighty percent of flavor comes from your nose, including a set of internal nostrils. When you chew food and hold it in your mouth, the gases that are released goes into these nostrils. People who wolf their food are missing some of the flavor. #Quote by Mary Roach

#32. Men should not labor foolishly like brutes, but the brain and the body should always, or as much as possible, work and rest together, and then the work will be of such a kind that when the body is hungry the brain will be hungry also, and the same food will suffice for both; otherwise the food which repairs the waste energy of the overwrought body will oppress the sedentary brain, and the degenerate scholar will come to esteem all food vulgar, and all getting a living drudgery. #Quote by Henry David Thoreau

#33. The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food. #Quote by Ruth Reichl

#34. When I [first] went to university, I was doing foreign languages, because I had done them since I was 13 years old. I had done French and German. I picked up Italian, just sort of blasted through the exams, [and then] took off overseas, because I wanted to be an actor. I thought, "I'm just not academic." I'm not very competitive, in terms of acting. But since going back to university, I've realized, I am highly competitive. #Quote by Nick Offerman

#35. You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere. #Quote by Anne Fadiman

#36. Tuesday - we had school for the first time. Madame O'Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling.

"Awful," a girl said.

"En français," Madame O'Malley replied. "En français. #Quote by John Green

#37. I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer. #Quote by Christian Louboutin

#38. If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.
If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer;
then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man
either for gain, for "sport," for food, or for knowledge.
Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty.
You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places
but you are a killer and so lose their friendship.
You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband. #Quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti

#39. Dad called this the shadow time. The sun sucks colour from the world, he'd said. He'd taught her to see the softer colours of the dusk, the green and orange bark, the purple shadows. At times like this Flinty felt her edges vanish, leaving her part of the mountains, like the wallaby pulling wonga vine down from a thorn bush, or the sleepy possum peering from a tree. #Quote by Jackie French

#40. For an animal to attack you, you must smell or look either dangerous, or delicious, or at least nutritious. #Quote by Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#41. Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better ... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. #Quote by Michael Pollan

#42. Senegal had always boasted one of Africa's most vibrant merchant cultures. The country's boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar's traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From #Quote by Howard W. French

#43. Once, my grandmama told me a story about her great-grandmama. She'd come across the ocean, been kidnapped and sold. Said her great-grandmama told her that in her village, they ate fear. Said it turned the food to sand in they mouth. Said everyone knew about the death march to the cost, that word had come down about the ships, about how they packed men and women into them. Some heard it was even worse for those who sailed off, sunk into the far. Because that's what it looked like when the ship crossed the horizon: like the ship sailed off and sunk, bit by bit, into the water. Her grandmama said they never went out at night, and even in the day, they stayed in the shadows of they houses. But still, they came for her. Kidnapped her here, and she learned the boats didn't sink to some watery place, sailed by white ghosts. She learned that bad things happened on that ship, all the way until it docked. That her skin grew around the chains. That her mouth shaped to the muzzle. That she was made into an animal under the hot, bright sky, the same sky the rest of her family was under, somewhere far aways, in another world. I knew what that was, to be made a animal. #Quote by Jesmyn Ward

#44. It was like when I'd taken a trip to some foreign land and everyone asked about it when I got back: my accounts would grow similar, focusing on this impression, that cool place, a certain funny anecdote, until there was just the one account which then substituted for my memory. Remembering this tendency, I felt an honest fear. It was the familiar fear, made honest through sudden intensity, that once all the sensation had evaporated from my life the residue would be a cliché. I'd die, St. Peter would be like, "So how was it?" and I'd say, "Great place. I liked the food. I was sick for part of it. But all the people were really nice." And that would be it. #Quote by Benjamin Kunkel

#45. We must take the best from the left and the best from the right to devise new strategies for the global twenty-first century. The reluctance of liberal professors to speak out against rampant abuses committed on their side (e.g., suppression of free speech, the excesses of women's studies and French theory) has simply increased the power of the right. #Quote by Camille Paglia

#46. My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches #Quote by Laura Esquivel

#47. Porridge is our soup, our grits, our sustenance, so it's pretty much the go-to for breakfast. For the first time, I ate with a bunch of other Taiwanese-Chinese kids my age who knew what the hell they were doing. Even at Chinese school, there were always kids that brought hamburgers, shunned chopsticks, or didn't get down with the funky shit. They were like faux-bootleg-Canal Street Chinamen.
That was one of the things that really annoyed me about growing up Chinese in the States. Even if you wanted to roll with Chinese/Taiwanese kids, there were barely any around and the ones that were around had lost their culture and identity. They barely spoke Chinese, resented Chinese food, and if we got picked on by white people on the basketball court, everyone just looked out for themselves. It wasn't that I wanted people to carry around little red books to affirm their "Chinese-ness," but I just wanted to know there were other people that wanted this community to live on in America. There was on kid who wouldn't eat the thousand-year-old eggs at breakfast and all the other kids started roasting him.
"If you don't get down with the nasty shit, you're not Chinese!"
I was down with the mob, but something left me unsettled. One thing ABCs love to do is compete on "Chinese-ness," i.e., who will eat the most chicken feet, pig intestines, and have the highest SAT scores. I scored high in chick feet, sneaker game, and pirated good, but relatively low on the SAT. I had made Na #Quote by Eddie Huang

#48. She hadn't known that the ability to make pancakes from scratch made a man brutally hot. Now she did. #Quote by Suenammi Richards

#49. I'm not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever. There's always opera. There's angel-food cake and neighborhood children caroling, and the look of autumn leaves on a wet roof. But no. My heart's some kind of idiotic fishing bobber. #Quote by George Saunders

#50. Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea.
Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries. #Quote by Chila Woychik

#51. Soup is to the meal, what the hostesses smile of welcome is to the party. A prelude to the goodness to come. #Quote by Louis Pullig De Gouy

#52. The defenders retreated, but in good order. A musket flamed and a ball shattered a marine's collar bone, spinning him around. The soldiers screamed terrible battle-cries as they began their grim job of clearing the defenders off the parapet with quick professional close-quarter work. Gamble trod on a fallen ramrod and his boots crunched on burnt wadding. The French reached steps and began descending into the bastion.
'Bayonets!' Powell bellowed. 'I want bayonets!'
'Charge the bastards!' Gamble screamed, blinking another man's blood from his eyes. There was no drum to beat the order, but the marines and seamen surged forward.
'Tirez!' The French had been waiting, and their muskets jerked a handful of attackers backwards. Their officer, dressed in a patched brown coat, was horrified to see the savage looking men advance unperturbed by the musketry. His men were mostly conscripts and they had fired too high. Now they had only steel bayonets with which to defend themselves.
'Get in close, boys!' Powell ordered. 'A Shawnee Indian named Blue Jacket once told me that a naked woman stirs a man's blood, but a naked blade stirs his soul. So go in with the steel. Lunge! Recover! Stance!'
'Charge!' Gamble turned the order into a long, guttural yell of defiance.
Those redcoats and seamen, with loaded weapons discharged them at the press of the defenders, and a man in the front rank went down with a dark hole in his forehead. Gamble saw the officer aim a pisto #Quote by David Cook

#53. Stated in the simplest terms, the recognized solution to the problem of foodborne illness is a comprehensive prevention strategy that involves all participants in the food system, domestic and foreign, doing their part to minimize the likelihood of harmful contamination. And that is the strategy mandated by FSMA. It is not a strategy that assumes we can achieve a zero-risk food supply, but it is a strategy grounded in the conviction that we can better protect consumers and the economic vigor of the food system if everyone involved implements reasonably available measures to reduce risk. #Quote by Michael R. Taylor

#54. Chocolate should be savored, not rushed. #Quote by Rick Riordan

#55. Food comas - known as postprandial somnolence by people who liked to get bean up during recess - are fine when you're relaxing with friends or family, but they're a major setback when you have exams and papers to write. #Quote by Stefanie Weisman

#56. Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. #Quote by Stella Benson

#57. The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won't be running away from it or hiding from it. #Quote by Nicolas Sarkozy

#58. What was that you were saying just before the food arrived? Something about me ... no competition ... best thing that ever happened to you ... "
"I don't remember that last part," I say, hoping it's too dim in here for the cameras to pick up my blush.
"Oh, that's right. That what I was thinking," he says. #Quote by Suzanne Collins

#59. Since 1985 our [American's] consumption of all added sugars- cane, beet, HFCS, glucose, honey, maple syrup, whatever- has climbed from 128 pounds to 159 pounds per person. #Quote by Michael Pollan

#60. How you brew your life is how it's gonna taste on your tongue. You have the choice to make it bitter or sweeter. It all depend on the actions that you take day in day out. #Quote by Israelmore Ayivor