In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight.
Interpretation
The skill of a great cook can transform simple ingredients into something wonderfully enjoyable.
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of a skilled chef, suggesting that even the most ordinary ingredient, like fish, can yield endless joy when prepared with expertise. It highlights how culinary talent can elevate food from mere sustenance to a source of pleasure and satisfaction.
In practice
In a cooking class, to illustrate the beauty of food preparation.
It has been shown as proof positive that carefully prepared chocolate is as healthful a food as it is pleasant; that it is nourishing and easily digested... that it is above all helpful to people who must do a great deal of mental work.
The limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed, and that we have no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.
Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.
Gourmandism is an act of judgment, by which we prefer things which have a pleasant taste to those which lack this quality.
You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?
Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life.
I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province.
As a chef I’m not your dietitian or your ethicist, I’m in the pleasure business.
He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.
Food is not just fuel. Food is about family, food is about community, food is about identity. And we nourish all those things when we eat well.
Don't dunk your nigiri in the soy sauce. Don't mix your wasabi in the soy sauce. If the rice is good, complement your sushi chef on the rice.
But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.
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