4
" Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.
To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.
Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold.
Oh, I'll accomodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a 'vegetarian plate', if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine. "
― Anthony Bourdain
5
" In the evenings the family gathered at Kirkwood Hall. Sometimes Andrew cooked, sometimes Delphine. There was a bounty of vegetables from the kitchen garden: tiny patty-pan squash, radishes both peppery and sweet, beets striped deep magenta and white, golden and green, butter lettuce and spinach and peas, zucchini blossoms stuffed with Graham's mozzarella and salty anchovies. Delphine whipped eggs from the chickens into souffles. Chicken- from the chickens, sadly- were roasted in a Dutch oven or grilled under a brick. Plump strawberries from the fields and minuscule wild ones from the forest were served with a drizzle of balsamic syrup or a billow of whipped cream. Delphine's baking provided custardy tarts, flaky biscuits, and deep, dark chocolate cake. "
― Ellen Herrick , The Forbidden Garden
6
" Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer...and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl. "
― M.F.K. Fisher , How to Cook a Wolf
