Culinary Imagination Quotes

Edible names are what drives me as a musician. My next band will be called the Hot Dogs.

the more experience you have, the more interesting cooking is because you know what can happen to the food. In the beginning you can look at a chicken and it doesn't mean much, but once you have done some cooking you can see in that chicken a parade of things you will be able to create.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you're interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was.

I can teach a chimp how to make linguini and clams. I can't teach a chimp to dream about it and think about how great it is.

The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen.

What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

I don't know if this is the flat-out strangest, but I'll never forget handling a human brain. It had been sliced into sections for autopsy, each about an inch thick, and felt like pork tenderloin. I swear to god, my first thought was that if you were to dust it with chipotle and cinnamon and saute it in butter, it would probably be delicious.

When I walk into a market I may see a different cut of meat or an unusual vegetable and think, ‘I wonder how it would be if I took the recipe for that sauce I had in Provence and put the two together?’ So I go home and try it out. Sometimes my idea is a success and sometimes it is a flop, but that is how recipes are born. There really are not recipes, only millions of variations sparked by someone’s imagination and desire to be a little creative and different. American cooking is built, after all, on variations of old recipes from around the world.

Food doesn't exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.

Would the cook were o' my mind!

Sometimes I'll get ideas in the middle of the night. Sometimes at 3 in the morning I'll get up, and I have a notebook by my bed and have to write it down. I'll dream an idea. Sometimes I see an image online, and I think, 'OK, let's make that a three-layer cake!'

Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for a painter, or the cap of Fortunatus for a conjurer.

And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don't always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I'm at a restaurant, I'll think, 'Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?'

Sometimes I dress like what I want for lunch, because all I can think about is having a tuna sandwich.

Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy.