Moreover, I always take home new tastes and new challenges, so my table for one is constantly changing. And friends and family who partake of my fare are, I hope, never bored. There is an old Italian saying, A tavola non s’invecchia — “At the table one never grows old.” Isn’t that reason enough to come home at the end of the day, roll up one’s sleeves, fire up the stove, and start smashing the garlic?

As Brillat-Savarin wrote: “The pleasures of the table are for every man, of every land, and no matter of what place in history or society; they can be part of all his other pleasures, and they last the longest to console him when he has outlived the rest.”

- Judith Jones, The Tenth Muse: My Life In Food

* Judith Jones is the Knopf book editor credited with discovering Julia Child in 1959.