top of page
Exlpore more Cooking quotes

"I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate."

"Actually, I'm happiest in Williams-Sonoma in New York. That's a wonderful cooking store."

"I'm obsessed with cooking shows, even though they make everything look so easy when it isn't."

"I have a cooking show that's coming on that I did in Albany. It will be on The Cooking Channel."

"My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes."

"Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession."

"A measuring jug is also vital when cooking rice, as this is always measured by volume rather than by weight."

"Jennifer Anne had prepared some complicated-looking recipe involving chicken breasts stuffed with sweet potatoes topped with a vegetable glaze. They looked perfect, but it was the kind of dish where you just knew someone had to have been pawing at your food for a long while to get it just right, their fingers all in what now you were having to stick in your mouth."
Explore more quotes by Mario Batali

"You know, when you get your first asparagus, or your first acorn squash, or your first really good tomato of the season, those are the moments that define the cook's year. I get more excited by that than anything else."

"We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day."

"The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it."

"There are pockets of great food in Spain, but there are also pockets of very mediocre food in Spain, and the same in Morocco and the same in Croatia and the same in Germany and the same in Austria."

"In America, I would say New York and New Orleans are the two most interesting food towns. In New Orleans, they don't have a bad deli. There's no mediocrity accepted."

"When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans."

"To eat the boiled head of a pig sliced like salami is very strange. It may seem cutting edge, but it's actually a lot older than any of the other traditional salami."

"As they say in Italy, Italians were eating with a knife and fork when the French were still eating each other. The Medici family had to bring their Tuscan cooks up there so they could make something edible."

"There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat."

"I just signed to do my next book with Ecco Press, a new primer or encyclopedia. This will be my take on what classic Italian cooking is."
bottom of page