“Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.”
— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I, Section II. Memb. 2. Subsec. 2.
“No one here will be surprised to hear me say that the Promethean fire which first raised humanity above the animal was the cooking fire.”
— Brian Stableford, The Last Supper, in David G. Hartwell (ed.) Year's Best SF 6, p. 108 (Originally published in Science Fiction Age, March 2000)
“Every investigation which is guided by principles of nature fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach.”
— Athenæus, Book VII, Chapter 2.
“Hallo! A great deal of steam! the pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding.”
— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave Three.
“The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.”
— Alexander Pope, Satires, Horace, Epistle II, Book II, line 85.
“Velocius (or citius) quam asparagi coquantur.”
— More quickly than asparagus is cooked.

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.