Claire Saffitz Quotes

Every year since culinary school I have made a Buche de Noel, or Yule Log.

Christmas cookies can't help but be retro - they are memory first, sugar-flour-egg-redhot-gumdrop-sparkle reality second.

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking.

My family, as you can probably guess, was more into Christmas cookies and not so much the fruitcake.

For reasons that aren't quite clear I derive a weird and almost inappropriate pleasure from making a cake that looks like a decomposing log. Essentially, that's what a Buche de Noel is supposed to look like, complete with meringue 'mushrooms' poking out of the chocolate buttercream 'bark.'

My sister, mom, and I always make holiday treats like Christmas cutout cookies and red and green chocolate chip cookies.

Of all the quirky, inexplicable, reindeer-embellished holiday traditions out there, making your own Yule log might take the cake.

Pecans are not cheap, my hons. In fact, in the South, the street value of shelled pecans just before holiday baking season is roughly that of crack cocaine. Do not confuse the two. It is almost impossible to make a decent crack cocaine tassie, I am told.

Brioches are a light, pale yellow, faintly sweet kind of muffin with a characteristic blob on top, rather like a mushroom just pushing crookedly through the ground. Once eaten in Paris, they never taste as good anywhere else.

For my part, my interest in Paris had faded away completely long ago when I learned that it was in France.

Cooking, I mean, food, cooking foods is just everything that I do from morning to night. It's how I choose to live my life: through cooking, people that are in food culture. And I love it.

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.

One is too taken up with all that one sees and hears in Paris, however strong one is, and what I do here [in Etretat] will at least have the merit of being unlike anyone else, at least I believe so, because it will simply be the expression of what I, and only I, have felt.

Pose? I don't pose. What am I? Paris Hilton or something?

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.

That bomb that took down that Russian airliner may have been the size of a soda can. And that bomb killed more people than all the Paris attackers combined. So this is still a grave threat.

Our tongues have fallen madly in love and gotten married and moved to Paris.

I think there is a Paris inside us all.

If you could learn how to make a perfect lemon tart then you got a story. If you don't feel like that, make a perfect chocolate chip cookie, but have five go-to dishes like that and you can move them around, change them up just a little bit, and always have something in the can.

I think I enjoy London the best as it's where I started my career. But Paris is beautiful too.

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.

No more coals to Newcastle, no more Hoares to Paris.