Tom Junod Quotes

Tom Junod

Profession : Journalist

Birth : April 9, 1958

There are only three questions that matter in the kitchen if you're cooking and not baking. The first is how good are your ingredients; the second is how much salt to add; and the third is how long to cook whatever it is you're cooking - the question of doneness.

Tom Junod

Food's not done until it yields something, maybe its soul or maybe just its secrets, and how long you're willing to wait for that to happen is a secret all your own.

Tom Junod

There's an easy way to tell who won a fight, whether it occurs in a ring or in a schoolyard. Watch it with a second-grade boy and ask him the winner. He'll always know. If he doesn't know, the fight wasn't worth watching.

Tom Junod

I was a bully in fifth and sixth grade. I wasn't one of the bullies - I wasn't strong or dominant enough to be one of the kids who bullied everyone in equal measure. I was a bully, in that I bullied a kid, whose name I won't mention here. My bullying was selective and personal.

Tom Junod

It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.

Tom Junod

I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.

Tom Junod

I am not running for president, but I've always known if I ever did run for president - or local dogcatcher, for that matter - the boy I bullied would and should arise as a necessary ghost from my past.

Tom Junod

The American middle class has always existed to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable: settled values with unsettled ones, social mobility with a sense of permanence.

Tom Junod

Between 1965 and 1980, my mother, Frances Junod, served cutlets of pale flesh - mostly veal and chicken, though sometimes pork - to my father, my brother and sister, and me at least twice a week.

Tom Junod

But I'm not an Atlanta Falcons fan. Nobody is. Sure, the team has its followers, its adherents, in Atlanta. But they don't follow the team the way fans from other teams follow their teams - the way, say, fans of the New Orleans Saints follow the Saints.

Tom Junod

And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you've been conditioned to think of the entree as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.

Tom Junod

The only restaurants in which you're actually happy to be served your entree are the restaurants that serve entrees ungarlanded by Chef's ambition - sushi joints and steakhouses.

Tom Junod

Most people are hungry, therefore they eat. I am hungry, therefore I cook. Since my senior year in college, when I moved into an apartment with a bunch of friends, I have cooked almost every day of my life.

Tom Junod

Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.

Tom Junod

I have never baked. I have cooked thousands of meals big and small, but I have never cooked a cookie. I have never roasted a cake, or a pie.

Tom Junod

That there is as yet no drug for immortality - or, for that matter, for muscle growth in the infirm - does not mean that immortality is theoretically or even technically impossible.

Tom Junod

The two biggest meals of your life you don't have to cook and you don't get to eat. The first you don't eat because no man eats - or cares what he eats - at his wedding. The second you don't eat because, well, no man eats at his funeral, either.

Tom Junod

Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be.

Tom Junod

There are no foodies at funerals.

Tom Junod

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

Tom Junod