"No, no - you'll have to give me the recipe."

In Rosemary's Baby (1968), an ambitious actor (John Cassavetes) and his childlike bride (Mia Farrow) move into a creepy New York apartment complex (the Dakota), and soon make the acquaintance of the strange old couple who are their neighbors.
More

"That's not coffee. That's brown water."

I like my coffee with a little texture, the kind you get when you make it in a French press. When the cup's nearly done, that's when you know whether it's serious. There should be some sediment left on the bottom, soft like river mud. More

"This chicken took longer than I expected. Hope it isn't done too much…It caught fire once."

Alfred Hitchcock's romantic thriller, Notorious (1946), gets a dry pinch of comic relief when hard-drinking Miami party girl, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), steps into the kitchen. On assignment in Rio with government agent, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant), Alicia seems to have turned over a new leaf. More

In the era of soup kitchens, charity gardens, and cheap recipe substitutions (think Crisco instead of butter, beef tongue instead of steak), moviegoers were ready to have more fun with food. In the screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby (1938), it's all tossed around with goofy extravagance.

It's a single olive that first brings uptight paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) to his knees. More

Restaurant orders can be as distinctive as fingerprints. A one-of-a-kind friend of ours would always line up "a white wine, a coffee, a glass of water—and something to drink," as soon as he sat down. More

"A woman happy happy in love, she burns the soufflé. A woman unhappy in love, she forgets to turn on the oven."

In Sabrina (1954), Audrey Hepburn plays a chauffeur's daughter in love above her station. Unnoticed and broken hearted, she goes to culinary school in Paris to forget. But even so far away, she can't keep her mind on her cooking. More

"You going to drink this here, or are you going to take it home and rub it on your chest?"

It's the cocktail to end all cocktails. In The Nutty Professor (1963), nebbishy chemistry instructor, Julius Kelp (Jerry Lewis), goes all Jekyll and Hyde when he mixes himself up a strengthening potion with some startling side effects. His resulting hep-cat alter ego, Buddy Love (bearing an uncanny resemblance to Lewis' ex-comedy partner, Dean Martin), is a killer ladies' man and barroom bully. He handles a cocktail shaker the way Prof. Kelp would a test tube, and he's particular about what he drinks. So, when the bartender at the campus hotspot, The Purple Pit, balks at his request for an "Alaskan Polar Bear Heater," Love is quick to set him straight: More

A small boy's birthday cake waits unclaimed at a bakery. A woman makes a shocking confession while rinsing spilled wine from a skirt. Catch from an ill-fated fishing trip goes up in flames on a patio grill. Natural and unnatural forces interrupt a family picnic in the California hills. Before Magnolia (1999) and Crash (2004), there was Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), a film whose characters' lives are as full of intersections as Ventura Boulevard.

More

"She never bought cheap stuff like that—not a lady like Miss Hunt."

In Laura (1944), hardboiled police detective Lt. Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) falls in love with a murdered woman through her portrait, her perfume, her diary—and her taste in scotch. More

What doesn't go with champagne? Used to be, you were just supposed to have it with things like caviar as an apéritif, with seafood for dinner, or eggs for brunch, but deep-fried foods, Asian dishes, and even popcorn have all become fair game.

In The Seven Year Itch (1955), we get an early, trail-blazing precedent. More