“Once my jars were labeled, I felt contentedly thrilled with myself, as if I had pulled off a wonderful trick. People feel this way when they bake bread or have babies, and although they are perfectly entitled to feel that way, in fact, nature does most of the work.”

“The old days were slower. People buttered their bread without guilt and sat down to dinner en famille.”

“You should have married a nice girl in her twenties so you can have dozens of babies,'Jane Louise said. 'Instead of the president of the Withered Crone Society.”

“To feel safe and warm on a cold wet night, all you really need is soup.”

“There is nothing like soup. It is by nature eccentric: no two are ever alike, unless of course you get your soup in a can.”

“From Laurie Colwin: Lovely writing! About grief she writes: "I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.”

“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.”