Love Quote by Harriet Van Horne

Van Horne’s line flatters the domestic arts and skewers them at the same time. “Cooking is like love” sounds like a gentle magazine aphorism, but the blade is in the second sentence: “entered into with abandon or not at all.” That phrasing borrows the language of romance, risk, even scandal, and drops it onto the kitchen counter. Cooking here isn’t thrift, duty, or calorie management. It’s a posture toward life: if you’re measuring everything, if you’re afraid to burn the butter or look foolish, you’ve already lost.

The intent is partly persuasive (cook with confidence), partly corrective (stop treating food as mere taskwork), and quietly rebellious for a mid-century cultural moment that loved to package women’s labor as cheerful obligation. Van Horne, a journalist with a taste for crisp provocation, reframes the kitchen not as a site of servitude but as a theater of appetite and agency. “Abandon” implies freedom from supervision: no recipe-as-law, no performance for approval, no anxious perfectionism. The quote also contains a veiled critique of half-hearted intimacy. Just as lukewarm love becomes maintenance, timid cooking becomes rote reproduction. Both are safe, both are joyless.

What makes it work is its absolutism. “Or not at all” is dare language, not advice. It dares the reader to choose: commit fully, accept the mess, let desire be visible. In a culture that often praises restraint, Van Horne’s moral is startlingly immodest: the point isn’t control; it’s surrender.