““The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.” The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was “in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce … the lightest and most agreeable food.” The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the “effect.””
![“[S]ometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn’t cross your mind until it’s too late. (Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food business, I was hired by the caper people to develop a lot of recipes using capers, and it was weeks of…” quote by Nora Ephron](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d79/nora-ephron-1217_business_s-ometimes-when-you-are-a-food-person-th_980.jpg)
