Wealth & Money Quote by Sally Schneider

Schneider’s line is kitchen advice that doubles as a quiet manifesto about restraint in an age that rewards excess. She’s not chasing the Instagram crescendo of “more”: more butter, more foam, more drama. She’s building a meal like a paragraph, using a plain first sentence to make the complex one land.

The specifics matter. “Often” signals habit, not dogma; this isn’t a rulebook, it’s a practiced instinct. “Room temperature vegetables” is a deliberately unsexy choice. It rejects the hot-and-crispy default and the chilled, dressed-to-impress crudite platter. Room temp lets flavor read without shock: sweetness, bitterness, the vegetable’s own water. It’s also a hospitality tell. Room temperature food suggests calm timing and confidence; you’re not performing, you’re hosting.

Then comes the real subtext: permission to make the main course “quite rich” without apology. The vegetables aren’t penance; they’re architecture. Schneider frames balance as sequencing, not substitution. You don’t have to purge pleasure from the meal; you can manage it by pacing the palate. That’s why “something like that” lands so well: it’s casual, almost tossed off, yet it opens a door to improvisation and taste rather than rigid technique.

Contextually, this is the sensibility of a writer who thinks in edits. The first course is negative space, a palate set to zero, so richness arrives as intention instead of accident.