Bill Buford Quotes
-
A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.
→ -
You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.
→ -
The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.
→ -
The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.
→ -
Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301)
→ -
Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.
→ -
In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'
→ -
You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.
→ -
The crowd is not us. It never is.
→ -
Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.
→
Related Authors
-
Nick Hornby Novelist -
Daniel Boulud Chef -
Gabrielle Hamilton Chef -
Marco Pierre White Chef -
Wylie Dufresne Chef -
Richard Ford Novelist -
Ian Jack Journalist -
Mario Batali Chef -
Ruth Reichl Writer -
Clinton Kelly Fashion Consultant -
M. F. K. Fisher Writer -
Mario Vargas Llosa Writer -
Martin Amis Novelist -
Jayne Anne Phillips Novelist -
Tobias Wolff Author -
Bobby Flay Chef -
Emeril Lagasse Chef -
Franklin Foer Journalist -
Michael Symon Chef -
Ryszard Kapuscinski Journalist