Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140006547X ISBN 13: 9781400065479

Publisher: Random House, 2007

Synopsis

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker–literally. As the home of A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M.F.K. Fisher, who practically invented American food writing, the magazine established a tradition that is carried forward today by irrepressible literary gastronomes, including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this indispensable collection, The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing on food and drink, seasoned with a generous dash of cartoons.

Whether you’re in the mood for snacking on humor pieces and cartoons or for savoring classic profiles of great chefs and great eaters, these offerings, from every age of The New Yorker’s fabled eighty-year history, are sure to satisfy every taste. There are memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems–ranging in tone from sweet to sour and in subject from soup to nuts.

M.F.K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those mysterious cooks who possess “an uncanny power over food,” while John McPhee valiantly trails an inveterate forager and is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl’s famous story “Taste,” in which a wine snob’s palate comes in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes’s ingenious tale of a lifelong gourmand who goes on a very peculiar diet for still more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can actually taste the difference between red wine and white. We journey with Susan Orlean as she distills the essence of Cuba in the story of a single restaurant, and with Judith Thurman as she investigates the arcane practices of Japan’s tofu masters. Closer to home, Joseph Mitchell celebrates the old New York tradition of the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Singer shadows the city’s foremost fisherman-chef.

Selected from the magazine’s plentiful larder, Secret Ingredients celebrates all forms of gustatory delight.

About this title

About the Author:

David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker.

From AudioFile:

This production of THE NEW YORKER's finest food writing is not as tasty as it might have been. The major glitch is the lack of an index, which means that, while readers can dip into the collection at will, audiobook listeners must hear it with no knowledge of what's coming. The content's unusual order--Anthony Bourdain's kitchen shock jock beside MFK Fisher's paean to "cookery witches"--makes the lack of indexing particularly frustrating. Eight different actors read the essays, articles, and poems. It's an interesting approach, which unfortunately doesn't work. The actors' widely varying voices and skills increase the production's uneven quality. Edible? Yes. Satisfying? No. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 140006547X
• ISBN 13: 9781400065479
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 582
• Editor: Remnick David