Laurie Colwin Quotes

#1. It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.

Laurie Colwin

#2. The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.

Laurie Colwin

#3. One of the delights of life is eating with friends; second to that is talking about eating. And, for an unsurpassed double whammy, there is talking about eating while you are eating with friends.

Laurie Colwin

#4. To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.

Laurie Colwin

#5. No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.

Laurie Colwin

#6. I am not a fancy cook or an ambitious cook. I am a plain old cook.

Laurie Colwin

#7. Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home.

Laurie Colwin

#8. Provision as much pure and organic food as you can, and let the rest go by.

Laurie Colwin

#9. Lentils are friendly - the Miss Congeniality of the bean world.

Laurie Colwin

#10. You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.

Laurie Colwin

#11. That family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities-that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of. The edifice that lovers build is by comparison delicate and one-dimensional.

Laurie Colwin

#12. He was the soul of kindness and concern. The fact that he had talked to my father about this made me want to stab him. But I only said, "I'll talk to Patrick. This doesn't sit right with me.

Laurie Colwin

#13. The fact is that modern life has deprived us of life's one great luxury: time.

Laurie Colwin

#14. The best way to eat crabs, as everyone knows, is off newspaper at a large table with a large number of people.

Laurie Colwin

#15. At a certain point, memory begins to be a burden.

Laurie Colwin

#16. Their first actual kiss was a one-celled organism which, after they had been standing on the stairway kissing for some time, evolved into something rather grander
a bird of paradise, for example.

Laurie Colwin

#17. The best way to feel at ease in the kitchen is to learn at someone's knee.

Laurie Colwin

#18. I do not believe that you have to spend a lot of money to eat well: it is hard to beat a plain old baked potato.

Laurie Colwin

#19. I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.

Laurie Colwin

#20. It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else.

Laurie Colwin

#21. We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes.

Laurie Colwin

#22. Cooking is like anything else: some people have an inborn talent for it. Some become expert by practicing, and some learn from books.

Laurie Colwin

#23. There is nothing like roast chicken. It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish no matter what the circumstances. Elegant or homey, a dish for a dinner party or a family supper, it will not let you down.

Laurie Colwin

#24. It is not just the Great Works of mankind that make a culture. It is the daily things, like what people eat and how they serve it.

Laurie Colwin

#25. A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

Laurie Colwin

#26. To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.

Laurie Colwin

#27. We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship, life is not worth living.

Laurie Colwin

#28. There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.

Laurie Colwin

#29. Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that.

Laurie Colwin

#30. The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: Even the simplest food is a gift.

Laurie Colwin

#31. My idea of a good time abroad is to visit someone's house and hang out, poking into their cupboards if they will let me.

Laurie Colwin

#32. From Laurie Colwin: Lovely writing! About grief she writes: I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.

Laurie Colwin

#33. The sharing of food is the basis of social life.

Laurie Colwin

#34. I put my lilies in front of Sam's plaque. I didn't want him to rest in peace. I wanted him to bounce around in death as he had in life, fearless, goofy, and fleet.

Laurie Colwin

#35. Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.

Laurie Colwin

#36. Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment.

Laurie Colwin

#37. When it comes to cakes and puddings, savouries, bread and tea cakes, the English cannot be surpassed.

Laurie Colwin

#38. I myself am not particularly interested in restaurant cooking. I don't really want to learn how to make a napoleon. I'd much rather learn how to make a very good lemon cake, which you can make in your own home. I like plain, old-fashioned home food.

Laurie Colwin

#39. No one who cooks cooks alone.

Laurie Colwin

#40. As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical.

Laurie Colwin

#41. The thing about homebodies is that they can usually be found at home. I usually am, and I like to feed people.

Laurie Colwin

#42. When I was alone, I lived on eggplant, the stove top cook's strongest ally. I fried it and stewed it, and ate it crisp and sludgy, hot and cold. It was cheap and filling and was delicious in all manner of strange combinations. If any was left over, I ate it cold the next day on bread.

Laurie Colwin

#43. I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in.

Laurie Colwin

#44. Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.

Laurie Colwin

#45. Somehow or other, I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd.

Laurie Colwin

#46. In this world of uncertainty and woe, one thing remains unchanged: Fresh, canned, pureed, dried, salted, sliced, and served with sugar and cream, or pressed into juice, the tomato is reliable, friendly, and delicious. We would be nothing without it.

Laurie Colwin

#47. Both happy and sad people can be cheered up by a nice meal,

Laurie Colwin

#48. For the socially timid, the kitchen is the place to be. At least, it is a place to start.

Laurie Colwin

#49. [On television:] It's made people moronic, it's robbed people of their ability to think. It's done tremendous damage, and every single household that has a small child should take it and throw it out the window.

Laurie Colwin

#50. These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture
a picture you did not have to paint yourself.

Laurie Colwin

#51. We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.

Laurie Colwin

#52. Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.

Laurie Colwin

#53. Yes, there was a trick to it. You inherited your life, or you invented it. You figured out what you wanted life to be and then somehow or other you made it that way. Then, miracle of miracles, you liked it!

Laurie Colwin

#54. Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed.

Laurie Colwin

#55. I come from a coffee-loving family, and you can always tell when my sister and I have been around, because both of us collect all the dead coffee from everyone's morning cup, pour it over ice, and drink it. This is a disgusting habit.

Laurie Colwin

#56. Many people eat salad dutifully because they feel it is good for them, but more enlightened types eat it happily because it is good.

Laurie Colwin

#57. People who like to cook like to talk about food ... without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.

Laurie Colwin

#58. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where longing used to be.

Laurie Colwin

#59. She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities
this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny.

Laurie Colwin

#60. Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.

Laurie Colwin

#61. When he went to college he wrote me letters which I answered within four days. Each letter took at least five drafts before I thought it suitable to send to Cambridge.

Laurie Colwin