Bill Buford

“I bashed myself. I cut myself. I caught on fire. I fell: I had been myopically focused on peeling garlic, and hadn't noticed a bin of beef at my feet until I walked into it.”

“Kasha is the hardy starch of a Slavic winter - buckwheat, in fact - but when cooked properly, it gets a nutty, deep-brown crust.”

“The reality of America is mass-market stupidity.”

“The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of 'cocoa mass.'”

“The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali's friends had described to me as the 'myth of Mario' was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner.”

“Gramercy Park is a four-acre square given in perpetuity to the residents surrounding it, 170 years ago, by Samuel Ruggles, a real estate developer of immoderate means.”

“You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.”

“For reasons I didn't understand, I felt I needed to learn how to cook the food of France and knew that I was going to have to get over to the country: to Paris, I'd always assumed.”

“I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher's looping knot and was so excited by the discovery that I went home and practiced. I told Elisa about my achievement. “I tied up everything,” I said. “A leg of lamb, some utensils, a chair. My wife came home, and I tied up her too.” Elisa shook her head. “Get a life,” she said and returned to her task.”

“Lyon is unusual and seems to be exceptionally incompetent at publicising itself. In fact, it doesn't want visitors. It fears discovery.”

“I just believe people should know what they're eating.”

“If kept dry, a chocolate with a high cacao content, I've discovered, rarely spoils.”

“When I was at Babbo, I was covered in scars and scabs and burned bits - melted hair, ribbed burns I got reaching across the top of a hot skillet... I sliced off the tip of my finger. I cleaved my forehead - a deep, ugly wound. Luckily, it regenerated.”