Delight

Good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and
liberality....

Once we lose touch with the spendthrift aspect of nature's provisions
epitomized in the raising of a crop, we are in danger of losing touch
with life itself. When Providence supplies the means, the preparation
and sharing of food takes on a sacred aspect. The fact that every crop
is of short duration promotes a spirit of making the best of it while
it lasts and conserving part of it for future use. It also leads to
periods of fasting and feasting, which represent the extremes of the
artist's situation as well as the Greek Orthodox approach to food and
the Catholic insistence on fasting, now abandoned.
....

It sometimes seems as if I have been rescuing a few strands from a
former and more diligent way of life, now being fatally eroded by an
entirely new set of values. As with students of music who record old
songs which are no longer sung, soon many of the things I record will
have also vanished.
.....

Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true
significance.
....

Cooking always is and always has been a partly scientific operation -
in the sense that specific actions under particular conditions lead to
foreseeable results. But it also presupposes aptitude, discernment and
an appreciation of the intrinsic nature of different foodstuffs and
awareness of the speeds at which they cook. Aptitude implies a certain
skill and not a little patience and is the ally of the wish to impart
to others something more than satisfacation, which can be called
delight.

- all from the Introduction of Patience Gray, Honey From A Weed