A queue outside a restaurant is a potent thing. And they’ve multiplied of late. I’ve noticed in my neck of the woods there are lines forming in unexpected places. There’s that ramen cafe just around the corner, a Thai hole-in-the-wall at the top end of Bourke, and dumplings in a grubby laneway off Collins. Melbourne’s…

“In the vegetable world, there is nothing so innocent, so confiding in its expression, as the small green face of the freshly shelled spring pea. Asparagus is pushing and bossy, lettuce is loud and blowsy, radishes are gay and playful, but the little green pea is so helpless and friendly that it makes really sensitive…

“It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking.” Marcel Boulestin

“A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.” Clifton Fadiman

“Nobody is king when we eat pizza. Nobody carves, nobody gets the best bit, there is no point on the circumference from which the most succulent cut is taken. … Born amongst the Neapolitan poor, gathering to its self the culinary traditions of the whole world, the modern pizza is, for all its shortcomings, the…

“Cauliflower is nothing but a cabbage with a college eduction.” Mark Twain

“Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.” G.K. Chesterton

The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palms, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers — all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent smell of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than…

‘Foods and the meals we make of them are our clocks. They are our faithful calendars. In a real sense, they are the time of our life.’ Jeremy MacClancy This morning I drank coffee with my beloved. Then there was breakfast. At midday, or thereabouts, I’ll eat lunch and tonight I’ll make dinner for my…

“And don’t let anyone tell you that the food is the only thing that matters. That’s rubbish. Where you eat something, who you eat it with and what you do afterwards is just as important. Eating is a whole package, not just what is on the plate. Food always tastes better in the right place,…

” … gastronomy is the great adventure of desire. Its subject is simple: the table is the place where a need becomes a want. Something we have to do — eat — becomes something we care to do — dine — and then something we care to do becomes something we try to do with…

Gay Bilson knows a thing or two about food. As a professional cook and restaurateur, she understands the world of fine dining and the sensibilities that drive those who cook for the top end of town. Her Sydney restaurants Bon Gout and Berowra Waters Inn are still remembered with acclaim. Now retired from the professional…

“What a shocking fraud the turkey is. In life, preposterous, insulting — that foolish noise they make. In death, unpalatable — practically no taste except a dry fibrous flavour reminiscent of a mixture of warmed up plaster-of-paris and horsehair. The texture is like wet sawdust and the whole vast feathered swindle has the piquancy of…

“The epicure is not a man who thinks of, and lives for, his belly alone; he is not a sensualist for whom dinner is merely an elaborate prelude to sexual passion; he is not a hedonist who sees life as a succession of pleasurable sensations obtained by hook, crook, or levitation … He is simply…

“Some people… have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it that he that does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.” Dr Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was an English poet, essayist,…