I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.

This quip is widely attributed to the American comedian and actor W. C. Fields and reflects the long-running public persona he cultivated in films, interviews, and publicity: a curmudgeonly wit with a fondness for alcohol. The line circulates primarily as an aphoristic one-liner in quotation collections rather than as a reliably traceable remark tied to a specific dated interview, performance, or publication. As with many Fields “drinking” jokes, it functions less as reportage of an occasion than as a distilled example of his comic brand—deadpan inversion and self-mockery—repeated and recopied in later popular culture.

A self-mocking one-liner built on comic misdirection: it begins like a respectable culinary tip—cooking with wine—then pivots to imply the wine is primarily for the cook’s own drinking. The joke trades on W. C. Fields’s long-standing public persona as a hard-drinking curmudgeon, a character he cultivated in films and stage work. Read as a piece of persona-driven humor, it satirizes bourgeois refinement (wine “in the food”) while celebrating indulgence and irreverence. Its durability comes from its compact structure and its playful confession, which turns a domestic activity into a sly admission of vice.