Cooking Quotes, Sayings
In this article, we’ll explore some of the most inspiring and thought-provoking cooking quotes and sayings ever spoken by famous chefs, authors, and food lovers from all over the world.
These sayings are sure to inspire, motivate, and make you think about food in a whole new way.
So whether you’re a seasoned cook or just starting out, we hope you enjoy these cooking quotes. And who knows, they might even inspire you to get in the kitchen and start cooking!
Best cooking quotes and sayings
Cooking is a universal language that can bring people together from all walks of life. It’s a way to express creativity, share culture, and build relationships. And it’s also a lot of fun, whether you’re just beginning or a seasoned pro!
Hopefully, these cooking quotes and sayings will inspire you wherever you are on your cooking journey.
1. Cooking with love quotes
Cooking is truly an act of love.
Jacues Pepin
Cooking is at once child’s play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.
Craig Claiborne
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
Thomas Wolfe
Cooking is an act of love, a gift, a way of sharing with others the little secrets that are simmering on the burners.
Sophia Loren
Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.
Harriet Van Horne
I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.
Shauna Niequist
Cooking is at once one of the simplest and most gratifying of the arts, but to cook well, one must love and respect food.
Craig Claiborne
Cooking together sayings
Cooking with kids is not just about ingredients, recipes, and cooking. It’s about harnessing imagination, empowerment, and creativity.
Guy Fieri
The most indispensable ingredient of all good home cooking: love for those you are cooking for.
Sophia Loren
For couples
I think careful cooking is love, don’t you? The loveliest thing you can cook for someone who’s close to you is about as nice a valentine as you can give.
Julia Child
Cooking is one of the greatest gifts you can give to those you love.
Ina Garten
You are the butter to my bread, and the breath to my life.
Julia Child
2. Inspirational cooking quotes
Cooking demands attention, patience, and above all, a respect for the gifts of the earth. It is a form of worship, a way of giving thanks.
Judith B. Jones
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors — it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.
Wolfgang Puck
Real cooking is more about following your heart than following recipes.
Unknown
Great cooking is about being inspired by the simple things around you — fresh markets, various spices. It doesn’t necessarily have to look fancy.
G. Garvin
Cooking is about imbibing different cultures and putting them in a plate on the table.
Johnny Iuzzini
If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook.
Thomas Keller
Motivational sayings
Cooking is one failure after another, and that’s how you finally learn.
Julia Child
Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation — experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way.
Paul Theroux
A recipe has no soul. You as the cook must bring soul to the recipe.
Thomas Keller
Cooking is not difficult. Everyone has taste, even if they don’t realize it. Even if you’re not a great chef, there’s nothing to stop you understanding the difference between what tastes good and what doesn’t.
Gerard Depardieu
The greatest dishes are very simple.
Auguste Escoffier
Cooking passion
So when people ask me, ‘What do you think of Michelin?’ I don’t cook for guides. I cook for customers.
Gordon Ramsay
Cooking is the most succulent of human pleasures.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Food lovers will enjoy these foodie quotes and sayings.
Cooking and happiness
A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.
Elsa Schiaparelli
The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
If cooking is what you love, do it with great vigor, pride, and excellence. It pleases me when I see guests conversing, noshing, happy and satisfied. I savor all the flavors of life.
Kai Chase
Cooking joy
Oh, I adore to cook. It makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way.
Truman Capote
The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living.
Dione Lucas
Food is celebratory. People who don’t cook don’t know how much fun they’re missing.
Leo Buscaglia
If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it’s not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others — it’s the same with music.
will.i.am
I’m just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.
Maya Angelou
3. Funny cooking quotes
I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
W.C. Fields
The only time to eat diet food is while you’re waiting for the steak to cook.
Julia Child
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.
H.L. Mencken
If God had intended us to follow recipes, He wouldn’t have given us grandmothers.
Linda Henley
It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it’s, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.
Deb Caletti
The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
Calvin Trillin
The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.
Andy Rooney
You can pretty much make fish soup out of anything, but it always tastes better if you include fish.
Sten Sture Skaldeman
Cute cooking sayings
In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.
Julia Child
There ain’t a body, be it mouse or man, that ain’t made better by a little soup.
Kate DiCamillo
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself “well, that’s not going to happen.”
Rita Rudner
The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later, you’re hungry again.
George Miller
The only thing that will make a souffle fall is if it knows you’re afraid of it.
James Beard
All cooking is a matter of time. In general, the more time, the better.
John Erskine
Cooking is like snow skiing: If you don’t fall at least 10 times, then you’re not skiing hard enough.
Guy Fieri
Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian, wine and tarragon make it French, sour cream make it Russian, lemon and cinnamon make it Greek, soy sauce makes it Chinese, garlic makes it good.
Alice May Brock
4. Cooking quotes about life
Much like gardening, most cooking manages to be agreeably absorbing without being too demanding intellectually. It leaves plenty of mental space for daydreaming and reflection.
Michael Pollan
I love to cook comfort food. I’ll make fish and vegetables or meat and vegetables and potatoes or rice. The ritual of it is fun for me, and the creativity of it.
Reese Witherspoon
Food is a necessary component to life. People can live without Renoir, Mozart, Gaudi, and Beckett, but they cannot live without food.
Grant Achatz
In cooking, as in all the arts, simplicity is the sign of perfection.
Curnonsky
For family
Food, to me, is always about cooking and eating with those you love and care for.
David Chang
Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.
Andre Simon
I want them to bite into a cookie, and think of me, and smile. Food is love. Food has a power. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my heart.
Jael McHenry
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
For mother
In the childhood memories of every good cook, there’s a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot and a mom.
Barbara Costikyan
For friends
Cooking is about creating something delicious for someone else.
Ayumi Komura
Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.
Maya Angelou
5. Cooking wisdom quotes
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
Cooking is a philosophy; it’s not a recipe.
Marco Pierre White
Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements.
Marcel Boulestin
I believe that there is always something new to learn, in fact, that is one of the three reasons that I chose to become a chef, that my education is never over.
Anne Burrell
Cooking is an observation-based process that you can’t do if you’re so completely focused on a recipe.
Alton Brown
I feel a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.
Madam Benoit
Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.
Maurice de Vlaminck
6. Famous cooking quotes
In general, mankind, since the improvement in cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires.
Benjamin Franklin
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors — it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.
Wolfgang Puck
From famous chefs
Taste as you go. When you taste the food throughout the cooking process, you can make adjustments as you go.
Anne Burrell
Cooking is the art of adjustment.
Jacques Pepin
Cooking is all about people. Food is maybe the only universal thing that really has the power to bring everyone together. No matter what culture, everywhere around the world, people get together to eat.
Guy Fieri
You don’t need a silver fork to eat good food.
Paul Prudhomme
Anthony Bourdain cooking quotes
The way you make an omelet reveals your character.
Anthony Bourdain
Anyone who’s a chef, who loves food, ultimately knows that all that matters is: ‘Is it good? Does it give pleasure?’.
Anthony Bourdain
Julia Child cooking quotes
Until I discovered cooking, I was never really interested in anything.
Julia Child
Always start out with a larger pot than what you think you need.
Julia Child
You don’t have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces, just good food from fresh ingredients..
Julia Child
No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.
Julia Child
Cooking well doesn’t mean cooking fancy.
Julia Child
Gordon Ramsay cooking quotes
You don’t come into cooking to get rich.
Gordon Ramsay
Cooking today is a young man’s game, I don’t give a bollocks what anyone says.
Gordon Ramsay
Wolfgang Puck cooking quotes
Cooking is an expression of the land where you are and the culture of that place.
Wolfgang Puck
Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors — it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.
Wolfgang Puck
7. Cooking proverbs
Laughter is brightest where food is best.
Irish proverb
Fish, to taste right, must swim three times — in water, in butter and in wine.
Polish proverb
Sour, sweet, bitter, pungent — all must be tasted.
Chinese proverb
A good fire makes a quick cook.
Dutch proverb
The best cook drops a whole tomato.
Spanish proverb
If you want dinner, don’t insult the cook.
Chinese proverb
Talking doesn’t get your rice cooked.
Chinese proverb
8. Cooking quotes for Instagram
Cooking with love provides food for the soul.
Valerie McKeehan
The secret of good cooking is, first, having a love of it.
James Beard
When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste.
Laiko Bahrs
All food starting with ‘p’ is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, pizza, pastry.
Sara Paretsky
Food is a passion. Food is love.
Hector Elizondo
The best meals are those you share with people you love.
Unknown
Short sayings for Instagram captions
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
George Bernard Shaw
Food should be fun.
Thomas Keller
Life is a combination of magic and pasta.
Federico Fellini
Cooking is revolution and creation.
Simone De Beauvoir
Cooking and baking is both physical and mental therapy.
Mary Berry
Happiness is homemade.
Unknown
When cooking, go by your own taste.
Laiko Bahrs
Chefs don’t make mistakes; they make new dishes.
Elizabeth Brigg
Great cooking favors the prepared hands.
Jacques Pepin
Cooking is the ultimate giving.
Jamie Oliver
If you think well, you cook well.
Ferran Adria
We hope that you enjoyed reading these cooking quotes and that they inspired you to get in the kitchen and start cooking!
By Greg Johnson | Published 7/18/2023
