Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink | 
| Creator: David Remnick
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $17.27
You Save: $12.68 (42%)
New (46) Used (13) from $17.27
Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 1542
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 582
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 140006547X
Dewey Decimal Number: 809.933559
EAN: 9781400065479
ASIN: 140006547X
Publication Date: October 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
New Yorker book of food and wine July 9, 2008
I gave this book as a gift to my husband. I was happy to find he loves it. He commented about how he enjoyed being able to skip around from one essay to another. He enjoys the variety of the essays from so many diverse authors. And of course, the fact that this book was edited by David Remnick is always a plus.
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink June 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Witty, insightful and you can pick it up anytime for a good read. A must for the beside or a carry-on for that long flight. The best of the New Yorker is simply the best you can get.
Vic W
 Greast foodie gift. June 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am a lifelong New Yorker reader and have many foodie friends for whom this will be a delightful gift.
New Yorker April 15, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
My sister is a fan of New Yorker magazines and books and she didn't even realize this one was out and so excited that I had gotten it for her for her birthday! She was thrilled
Seventy Years of Great Writing about Dining Out, Food, Beverages, and Dieting February 25, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
In praising Secret Ingredients, I'm torn between praising the writing style or the content more highly. Both are superb.
As a reading experience, you'll find your mouth watering, your mind remembering tastes and aromas you haven't experienced in years, your eyes alight with remembered scenes you've enjoyed, your mouth smiling as you enjoy great turns of phrase, and your hand writing down things from the book you want to try. At the same time, you'll be learning more about food, beverages, cooking, gathering food, catching fish, preparing food, and dining than you had ever thought you would know.
I normally plow through a book like this in an evening, but I was having so much fun I stretched the pleasure out over several days. I recommend you do the same.
The opening section on dining out was a revelation as I learned about huge feasts that all-male groups would eat unbelievable quantities of food in New York without benefit of tables or utensils. The theme of that section is how overeating has slowly disappeared from eating out as diners more often included women and weight concerns and health consciousness rose.
The book's title is an allusion to how those who are proud of their recipes often pretend to share their recipes while secretly sabotaging the results by leaving out an ingredient or an instruction. That reference appears throughout the book, not just in M.F.K. Fisher's essay by that name.
For those who love haute cuisine in France and New York, there are many articles that show how that estimable pastime has been changing over many decades. For me, there was a lot of nostalgia in reading about restaurants in France and New York where I've had memorable meals. There's a nice lengthy section on Julia Child that will stir happy memories for many about learning French cooking.
To me, the most fascinating articles were about finding food such as A Mess of Clams, A Forager, The Fruit Detective, Gone Fishing, and On the Bay. The most unexpected section was on local delicacies (including Peter Hessler on eating rats).
I was intrigued to find an article where I was an unacknowledged source, Malcolm Gladwell's article about ketchup, for which I had supplied a lot of information about Grey Poupon mustard's great success.
The fiction section is most enjoyable and allows more room for the writing to blossom.
Now, there's a special treat you might not have expected: Many of The New Yorker's best food and beverage cartoons are included. These humorous contributions add a light touch for those sections that become almost too serious.
I was very impressed by the editing done for this book. The articles were well chosen for themselves and for fitting into major themes in the book, themes that both matched the contents' categories and over arched those categories.
Bravo and bon appetit!
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