Food Porn Quotes

“We almost always want variety from the food we eat, but almost never from the people with whom we eat.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The custard should be firm but not immobile; when you press it with your fingers, it should have a little wobble still within. Soft, warm and voluptuous - like an 18th century courtesan's inner thigh.”
― Nigella Lawson, How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food

“We ate slowly, looking at each other the whole while, silent, anticipating, savoring the sensations building, mounting inside. Utterly enthralled I watched him eat chicken, his strong white teeth tearing the flesh apart, and it was thrilling, tantalizing. I observed the way his neck muscles worked when he swallowed his wine, and that was thrilling, too and I watched with fascination as his large brown hand reached out, fingers wrapping around a fuzzy golden-pink peach, clutching it. He took up a knife and carefully peeled the peach and divided it into sections and ate them one by one, his brown eyes devouring me as he did so. The tip of his tongue slipped out and slowly licked the peach juice from his lips…”
― Jennifer Wilde, Angel in Scarlet

“There's no messing with perfection. (Okay, a little messing, just for fun.) A few crystals of coarse sea salt, a drizzle of local olive oil, and a sprig or two of purple basil. Sliced and layered in a white ceramic dish, the tomatoes often match the hues of the local sunsets--- reds and golds, yellows and pinks. If there were such a thing in our house as "too pretty to eat," this would be it. Thankfully, there's not.
If I'm not exactly cooking, I have done some impromptu matchmaking: baby tomatoes with smoked mozzarella, red onions, fennel, and balsamic vinegar. A giant yellow tomato with a local sheep's milk cheese and green basil. Last night I got a little fancy and layered slices of beefsteak tomato with pale green artichoke puree and slivers of Parmesan. I constructed the whole thing to look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I love to think of the utterly pretentious name this would be given in a trendy Parisian bistro:
Millefeuille de tomate provençale, tapenade d'artichaut et coppa de parmesan d'Italie (AOC) sur son lit de salade, sauce aigre douce aux abricots.
And of course, since this is a snooty Parisian bistro and half their clientele are Russian businessmen, the English translation would be printed just below:
Tomato napoleon of artichoke tapenade and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese on a bed of mixed greens with sweet-and-sour apricot vinaigrette.
The sauce abricot was a happy accident. While making the dressing for the green salad, I mistook a bottle of peach/apricot syrup for the olive oil. Since I didn't realize my mistake until it was at the bottom of the bowl, I decided to try my luck. Mixed with Dijon mustard and some olive oil, it was very nice--- much sweeter than a French vinaigrette, more like an American-style honey Dijon. I decided to add it to my pretentious Parisian bistro dish because, believe it or not, Parisian bistros love imitating American food. Anyone who has been in Paris in the past five years will note the rise of le Tchizzberger. (That's bistro for "cheeseburger.")
I'm moderate in my use of social media, but I can't stop taking pictures of the tomatoes. Close up, I've taken to snapping endless photos of the voluptuously rounded globes. I rejoice in the mingling of olive oil and purply-red flesh. Basil leaves rest like the strategically placed tassels of high-end strippers. Crystals of sea salt catch the afternoon sun like rhinestones under the glaring lights of the Folies Bergère. I may have invented a whole new type of food photography: tomato porn.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes

“I dip my sandwich into my soup and practically orgasm with the first bite. Rogan shakes his head and tries to fight a smile as I make sweet, sweet love to my lunch without a single ounce of shame.”
― Ivy Asher, The Bone Witch

“The next dish was a plate of three gently cooked quail eggs served in a buttery crust filled with an equally buttery leek cream, and topped with a generous spoonful of jet-black caviar. Cassie broke open the runny yolk of an egg with the tip of her fork, videoing as it oozed into the caviar and covered the tart.
"Now that's what I call food porn," she said, before taking a bite.”
― Emily Arden Wells, Eat Post Like

“Chef Simone is clearly inspired by classical French cooking but she's totally making it her own. SHE'S so cool.
For instance, her "half-cooked" potatoes are shredded, poached in oil, drained, and tossed with a lip-smacking homemade XO sauce, and then topped with a perfect piece of steamed turbot. It's not your traditional, beautifully plated French meal, but I swear it has raw sex appeal and it's so good.”
― Amy Rosen, Off Menu

“which anyone could have guessed from breakfast.

Usually our morning fare was watery vegetable broth and burnt rice, but today a feast awaited us. There was fish congee with all the toppings-chives and dried shrimp and salted eggs and an enormous pan of fried crullers, her specialty. Mama only made crullers when she foresaw good tidings in our future.

"This is the trip that's going to change everything," she'd said, dropping a cruller into Nomi's bowl of congee. "I can feel it." After we ate, she gathered us around Baba. "Come, ask your father what presents you'd like him to bring back.”
― Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate

“Whenever I go online, I can count on being confronted with a recipe that I never asked for and which, the moment I see it, I kind of want to eat. Recently it was 'Herby Chicken Caesar Schnitzel', which was accompanied by the kind of video that's carefully calibrated to stoke a craving. Here's the schnitzel being caressed by soft, amber bubbles in the pan. Here's a money shot, when a knife rasps demonstratively over the crust. Here's a green salad being twisted through a slippery dressing. It is slung on top of the schnitzel like a satin quilt on an unmade bed. 'She's crispy, saucy, cheesy and a little bit spicy,' the recipe developer, Jodie Nixon, explains in the voiceover. It was posted by Mob-- a hugely successful British recipe platform with an ensemble cast of recipe developers, popular on social media and among younger cooks.
Another day, it'll be an unsolicited close-up of a chicken thigh, fresh out of the pan, with tortoiseshell caramelized skin. 'They're crunchy, they're juicy,' Jordan Ezra King-- the cook-- says on the voiceover. 'Gonna do it with herby rice, and some nice pickle-y fresh crunchy salad.' Again, it was a recipe from Mob. Or how about those few weeks when my For You pages were hacked by an Instagram-famous sausage and gochujang rigatoni? You crumble and fry sausage meat until it's lightly browned, in pieces the size of granola clusters, then add gochujang, cream, shallot, Parmesan, breadcrumbs and a few other things. You can tell it's going to be aggressively pleasing in the same way as a McDonald's double cheeseburger. The recipe developer, Xiengni Zhou, narrates the video. 'It's quick, creamy, and kind of spicy,' she says, and the dish looks so good that you don't even care that you're getting déjà vu. The video has tens of thousands of likes, and it is also, unsurprisingly, from Mob.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

“We have Nigel Slater to thank for some of the horniest food content. Marie Claire magazine, for which Slater was hired to write the recipes, published a cookbook in 1992. The food photographs, by Jean-Louis Bloch-Lainé and Kevin Summers, catch the food in moments of déshabillé: mussels coaxed open, crust of a cheesy gratin broken by a spoon, juices dripping down a figgy pudding. It was, as Slater put it in the introduction, 'the decision to abandon those props, those traditional scene-setters, and the avoidance of styling and tweaking the food to look good for the camera.' It was the same at the Observer, where Nigel Slater moved in the early nineties, with Kevin Summers and then Jonathan Lovekin photographing the food. Everything is burst, collapsed, juicy, swollen or sizzling, and indecently close up. This new kind of photo was composed to make the food look not beautiful, as such, but craveable. It's strange now to think that recipes weren't always supposed to be thirst traps. But the most consequential parts of food culture are often the things like this-- things that seem so obvious, so unquestionable, that it never occurs to us that they could be done another way.”
― Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now