Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

by David Remnick (Editor)

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.

Dining out: All you can hold for five bucks / Joseph Mitchell --
The finest butter and lots of time / Joseph Wechsberg --
A good appetite / A.J. Liebling --
The afterglow / A.J. Liebling --
Is there a crisis in French cooking? / Adam Gopnik --
Don't eat before reading this / Anthony Bourdain --
A really big lunch / Jim Harrison --
Eating in: The secret ingredient / M.F.K. Fisher --
The trouble with tripe / M.F.K. Fisher --
Nor censure nor disdain / M.F.K. Fisher --
Good cooking: / Calvin Tomkins --
Look back in hunger / Anthony Lane --
The reporter's kitchen / Jane Kramer --
Fishing and foraging: A mess of clams / Joseph Mitchell --
A forager / John McPhee --
The fruit detective / John Seabrook --
Gone fishing / Mark Singer --
On the bay / Bill Buford --
Local delicacies: An attempt to compile a short history of The buffalo chicken wing / Calvin Trillin --
The homesick restaurant / Susan Orlean --
The magic bagel / Calvin Trillin --
A rat in my soup / Peter Hessler --
Raw faith / Burkhard Bilger --
Night kitchens / Judith Thurman --
The pour: Dry martini / Roger Angell --
The red and the white / Calvin Trillin --
The russian god / Victor Erofeyev --
The ketchup conundrum / Malcolm Gladwell --
Tastes funny: But the one on the right / Dorothy Parker --
Curl up and diet / Ogden Nash --
Quick, hammacher, my stomacher! / Ogden Nash --
Nesselrode to jeopardy / S.J. Perelman --
Eat, drink, and be merry / Peter De Vries --
Notes from the overfed / Woody Allen --
Two menus / Steve Martin --
The zagat history of my last relationship 409(3) / Noah Baumbach --
Your table is ready / John Kenney --
Small plates: Bock / William Shawn --
Diat / Geoffrey T. Hellman --
4 a.m. / James Stevenson --
Slave / Alex Prud'Homme --
Under the hood / Mark Singer --
Protein source / Mark Singer --
A sandwich / Nora Ephron --
Sea urchin / Chang-Rae Lee --
As the french do / Janet MalColm --
Blocking and chowing / Ben McGrath --
When edibles attack / Rebecca Mead --
Killing dinner / Gabrielle Hamilton --
Fiction: Taste / Roald Dahl --
Two roast beefs / V.S. Pritchett --
The sorrows of gin / John Cheever --
The jaguar sun / Italo Calvino --
There should be a name for it / Matthew Klam --
Sputnik / Don DeLillo --
Enough / Alice McDermott --
The butcher's wife / Louise Erdrich --
Bark / Julian Barnes

Genres: Food, Nonfiction, Essays, Food Writing, Cooking, Cookbooks, Short Stories

582 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

David Remnick (born October 29, 1958) is an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin s Tomb The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He has also served on the New York Public Library’s board of trustees. In 2010 he published his sixth book, The Bridge The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.

Remnick was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, the son of a dentist, Edward C. Remnick, and an art teacher, Barbara (Seigel). He was raised in Hillsdale, New Jersey, in a secular Jewish home with, he has said, “a lot of books around.” He is also childhood friends with comedian Bill Maher. He graduated from Princeton University in 1981 with an A.B. in comparative literature; there, he met writer John McPhee and helped found The Nassau Weekly. Remnick has implied that after college he wanted to write novels, but due to his parents’ illnesses, he needed a paying job—there was no trust fund to rely on. Remnick wanted to be a writer, so he chose a career in journalism, taking a job at The Washington Post. He is married to reporter Esther Fein of The New York Times and has three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha. He enjoys jazz music and classic cinema and is fluent in Russian.

He began his reporting career at The Washington Post in 1982 shortly after his graduation from Princeton. His first assignment was to cover the United States Football League. After six years, in 1988, he became the newspaper’s Moscow correspondent, which provided him with the material for Lenin's Tomb. He also received the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

Remnick became a staff writer at The New Yorker in September, 1992, after ten years at The Washington Post.

Remnick’s 1997 New Yorker article “Kid Dynamite Blows Up,” about boxer Mike Tyson, was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 1998 he became editor, succeeding Tina Brown. Remnick promoted Hendrik Hertzberg, a former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and former editor of The New Republic, to write the lead pieces in “Talk of the Town,” the magazine’s opening section. In 2005 Remnick earned $1 million for his work as the magazine’s editor.

In 2003 he wrote an editorial supporting the Iraq war in the days when it started. In 2004, for the first time in its 80-year history, The New Yorker endorsed a presidential candidate, John Kerry.

In May 2009, Remnick was featured in a long-form Twitter account of Dan Baum’s career as a New Yorker staff writer. The tweets, written over the course of a week, described the difficult relationship between Baum and Remnick, his editor.

Remnick’s biography of President Barack Obama, The Bridge, was released on April 6, 2010. It features hundreds of interviews with friends, colleagues, and other witnesses to Obama’s rise to the presidency of the United States. The book has been widely reviewed in journals.

In 2010 Remnick lent his support to the campaign urging the release of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning after being convicted of ordering the murder of her husband by her lover and adultery.

In 2013 Remnick ’81 was the guest speaker at Princeton University Class Day.

Remnick provided guest commentary and contributed to NBC coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia including the opening ceremony and commentary for NBC News.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you haven't read the New Yorker every week for the last 70 years, this is a good way to catch up on the food articles. The subject is captivating for any foodie, but the writing grabs anyone who has ever eaten. Many of the articles written in the 30s or 40s seems like they could have been published today.

[Madhulika Liddle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d been scouting for Christmas presents, and spotting Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, figured this might make a good gift for someone I know whose reading largely consists of non-fiction, and who is both an excellent cook as well as generally interested in food. I bought it, therefore, and (since I share that fondness, both for food as well as for non-fiction), decided to read the book before I wrapped it and bunged it under the tree.

Edited by the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, Secret Ingredients is a collection of writing on food and drink (the articles on food far outnumbering those on drink). The writers include several leading lights of food writing, all the way from AJ Liebling to Anthony Bourdain, to writers one normally doesn’t associate with writing about food: Dorothy Parker, Roald Dahl, Steve Martin, Ogden Nash. What this means, of course, is a very eclectic bill of fare, including fiction and non-fiction, even poetry.

The bulk of the book is non-fiction. This is divided into seven sections, each devoted to one particular aspect of food:

Dining Out: Which includes some brilliant pieces, from a description of a thirty-seven course lunch designed and hosted by Gerard Depardieu, to Anthony Bourdain’s ‘insider’ view of what actually happens in restaurant kitchens—and why well-done steak is not a good idea.

Eating In: About cooking at home, from the ‘secret ingredients’ so many good home cooks guard jealously, to the associations we build up with certain foods.

Fishing and Foraging: All about the gathering of ingredients, whether it’s an account of fishing for clams or a fascinating adventure of a week in the wilderness, living (and grandly, too) off the herbs and nuts and fruit that grow wild.

Local Delicacies: Another winner of a section, as far as I was concerned, with several particularly memorable articles: on the making of artisanal tofu in Japan; a town in China of which the local specialty is rat; the origin—disputed—of the Buffalo chicken wing; and a quest for a particular pumpernickel bagel.

The Pour: The drinks section, including an interesting essay, by Calvin Trillin, on the debate about whether or not it really is possible to tell red wine from white if you can’t see the colour.

Tastes Funny: Humorous writing on food. This was one of the disappointing sections for me because, barring an article on dieting, I didn’t really find any of the pieces here especially funny. Despite the presence of humour stalwarts like Woody Allen, Dorothy Parker, and Ogden Nash.

Small Plates: A section that I enjoyed thoroughly. This was a collection of quick-read, two- and three-page articles on an array of subjects, from using a running car’s engine to cook food, to food allergies, a bustling fish market at dawn, to a mouthwatering description of a takeaway specializing in soups.

Lastly, there is the Fiction section. Like Tastes Funny, this one disappointed me somewhat. Not because the stories were bad (some of them were very good, in fact), but because most of them—other than the first story, Roald Dahl’s Taste—lacked that deep, intrinsic connection to food or drink that I was hoping for.

Another thing that left me feeling slightly dissatisfied was the relative lack of articles on global cuisine. Yes, there are a few on French food (including one on Julia Child, responsible for popularizing French cuisine in the US), and there is an article each on Japanese, Korean, and Chinese ingredients—and isolated bits and bobs on Mexican and Cuban (or Basque, to be precise) food, but there was so much more I’d have liked to read about. South East Asian food, for example, or the food of the Middle East or the Mediterranean.

On the whole, though, a very good book, and some fine writing on food. Informative, interesting, nostalgic, inspiring. On a reread, I’ll probably skip Tastes Funny and Fiction, but the rest is worth reading all over again. And the cartoons after each piece fit in perfectly with the theme of the book.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing, and so much fun. I read it straight through, and I wish it were longer so that I could read more! It makes you realize that food is so essential to life, and often I would not even remember an article was about food, being so drawn in to reading about its pivotal role in our lives. Highly recommend for anyone who cares about food. Or life, for that matter.

[Amy]

I have little hope of finishing this one during the brief time allotted to me by our local public library. I actually can't even finish an issue of The New Yorker in the time allotted, let alone this fatty fat food book.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic writing about discovering the pleasures of the palette...what could be better??? I read the "New Yorker" every week, but I look forward to their annual "Food Issue" with great anticipation. This collection will make you drool.

[Maureen Flatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no down side to this book. It's the perfect night table reading, especially if you love food. You can dip in and out but every essay is wonderful!

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started out slow, picked up pace with exciting and interesting articles, then kinda fizzled out at the end. Loved the articles which explored interesting and unheard of delicacies. Even enjoyed articles about food processes I knew very little about, ie; cheese nun, the art of tofu. Also, very much enjoyed the Julia Childs article/bio, but overall found the entire collection together to be lacking. I find the New Yorker always has such interesting food-related articles, that it was kind of a let-down when a collection of said-related articles did not provide as great reading. Perhaps some of teh writing was outdated, and could not keep me as enthused to read about soem French bistro in the 1920s... (no that can't be it, 'cause the Dorothy Parker article was one of my favorites). Hard to explain what I found lacking. Recommend subscribing to New Yorker and looking up current issues articles regarding food/restaurants/booze/and food. Perhaps a good bedside-table book, to open and read an article, put away, move on to the next great literary treat, repeat...

[gianina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An all-star feast for the senses. Good food and drink is simultaneously one of the simplest and one of the richest pleasures one can experience in life, I could read about it forever.

Favorites include Good Cooking - a charming profile on Julia Child, The Magic Bagel - an attempt to distill into a few words what makes the New York bagel truly special, Night Kitchens - romanticizing the theater and craftsmanship of Japanese cooking, The Red and The White - setting the record straight on whether the average drinker can taste the difference between red and white wine, and The Ketchup Conundrum - the secrets in the sauce.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was a very enjoyable compendium of food and drink articles from the New Yorker Magazine. I particularly enjoyed some of the looks back at restaurant life in the 40s and 50s, and some of the more modern reviews of food and drink. If you enjoy this kind of stuff, I definitely recommend it.

[Marla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually have been doing no reading during the moving process! Now I can take a little time each day for my book friends.
Calvin Trillin's piece on wine is hilarious!

[Sammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do love me some books about food!

This was a fun collection of assorted food writing. It starts off with non-fiction: essays, opinion pieces, biographical pieces, articles. From there we get a couple of quite entertaining poems, before it moves on to a collection of short stories which, naturally, have food as a central theme.
The timeframe these were written spans decades, which adds an interesting dimension to the collection.

I enjoyed the book on the whole, but I enjoyed the non-fiction section a lot more than the fictional section. Some of the stories were a little dull, while the non-fiction was much more interesting on the whole.

It's got a few items that focus on different quisines, but on the whole it is very strongly biased towards the American food experience, which is only to be expected from an American publication of course.

Still, if they did more of these collections, I would absolutely consider reading them.

And now I'm hungry...

[Romany Arrowsmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are some of the words I learned from this collection:
spicule, caporal, voluptuary [as opposed to ascetic], esculence, hortatory, peroration, simonizing, meretricious.

Best of, in an almost entirely worthy 600 pages:
Is There A Crisis in French Cooking?, Adam Gopnik
A Really Big Lunch, Jim Harrison
The entire "Fishing and Foraging" section; overall, this section is of the most timeless and edifying quality
Raw Faith, Burkhard Bilger
Dry Martini, Roger Angell
The Russian God, Victor Erofoyev
But The One On The Right—, Dorothy Parker
Nesselrode to Jeopardy, S.J. Perelman
4 A.M., James Stevenson
Slave, Alex Prud'homme
Protein Source, Mark Singer
Killing Dinner, Gabrielle Hamilton
The entire "Fiction" Section

The weakness is the overwhelming wealth of it, how so many writers sound like a long ya-a-a-wn as they light a cigar and discuss the gold standard in mahogany chairs. Not very relatable. But always very tasty. Dorothy Parker and Gabrielle Hamilton are the only two that fully escape this style.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I commute ten hours a week, so I download a lot of audiobooks: the longer, the better. So, when I found this 20-hour compendium, I was elated. This only goes to show that I am an idiot. I'm the equal to the guy who watched Star Wars for the first time on a 13 inch black-and-white television. People who write for The New Yorker write prose that begs to be read. It is not performance art; it is visual. I should know that, but apparently I took all leave of my senses. So, I listed to all 20 hours of this wonderful book, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself, but please don't do as I did. M.F.K. Fisher (and others) deserve to be read. Their words are beautiful, and they need to be seen. So please see this book. You'll be glad you did.

[Sadie Dorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this book up for $10 at a used bookstore with the intention of it as a coffee table read - ended up binging every short story in this and LOVED (it even got passed around to a few friends who found foodie joy in the anecdotes).

This is a must own for any food friends, chefs, hospitality folks, etc. The best part of this book is the diversity of experiences, poems, mini memoirs, etc. that all connect to food. I also learned A LOT - particularly about certain product’s history and the process of acquiring special foods.

My favorite stories were: Foraging, Oyster, Beef Steak.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a bible of good food writing. And, like the Bible, it had some slow and poor parts, but when it worked it worked so well, and when it didn't it didn't for only a handful of pages. Although this took half a year to finish I was really glad I didn't skim through it. My copy is worn, breaking, covered in stains and marks. Good. I'll be happy to pass it along to the next recipient.

[Jessica – Books, Books, and Japan! · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive book to have if you love food. Some genuinely memorable writings in the book are by celebrities like Steve Martin, MFK Fisher, Dorothy Parker, and Roald Dahl. Interestingly, the compilation consists of everything from poems and works of fiction to thought pieces and articles —definitely a book to savor slowly over weeks, if not months.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great variety of food literature. Some of my favorites were a peek into the restaurant scenes of pre-world war times. I also learned so much about oysters!
Pretty much if you love learning about food and drinks, this is an enjoyable read.

[Thaddeus Croyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considering how thick this was, I only skipped one article (not counting the few I'd already read elsewhere).

[Redbird · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read a few stories but didn't really hold my interest. ***** for Roald Dahl though.

[Larissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been working my way through this collection of New Yorker essays (there's fiction, too, but that's not why I picked it up) at a pretty good clip. This is a wonderful collection, interesting not only for the variety of food essays and styles of writing (OMG--long form journalism!), but also because it provides a sort of snapshot of The New Yorker from the 30s through the present day. I am not a regular reader of the magazine--or really, of any magazine or journal or newspaper (I'm appallingly bad at keeping up with periodicals)--so this is a very interesting socio-historical window for me. I'm also enjoying that many of the pieces are as much, if not more, about the people involved in the production of food/meals as the food itself.

The collection is divided into several sections, which I've marked below in bold. Some thoughts on each piece as a I go:

Dining Out

I think it says a lot that in a collection of New Yorker food writing spanning the 30s to the 00s that four of the seven pieces in the "Dining Out" section are at least tangentially about French cooking. (I think three out of those four were written prior to the 70s, so perhaps this is more a function of the fact that French cooking was, until relatively recently, rather exclusively synonymous with fine cuisine, but still.) I don't have an overwhelming interest in reading about French cooking, though, so I'll probably skip over a fair amount of these.

I also find Anthony Bourdain to be far too proud of himself for saying things that he believes to be bold and shocking, as he does in the first line of his irritatingly titled "Don't Read Before Eating This," essay: "Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay." Skipping that on principal.

Eating In

Nor Censure Nor Disdain by M.F.K. Fisher (1968)

A short meditation on the American casserole, and leftover cooking in the U.S. in the 60s. It's a fun concept, and decently written, but perhaps a veers a little off course and loses focus toward the end.

Good Cooking by Calvin Tompkins (1947)

A wonderful long form essay about Julia Child, still written in her heyday, but well after she had become a household name with the publication of her Mastering the Art of French Cooking cook books, and her TV show, The French Chef. The piece details the development and publication process of her cookbooks (they took over ten years to co-author and the first draft had to be entirely scrapped), the way her show was initially produced, and her life and incredibly close relationship with her husband Paul.

They would have been fascinating people even if Julia hadn't become the Grand Dame of French cooking in America--they met as employees of the Office of Strategic Services in Ceylon, worked together throughout WWII, and were married shortly after. They lived in Paris, in Marseille, in Norway (she learned some Norwegian, actually); they didn't have children; Julia was 10 years younger than Paul; they did pretty much everything together, as far as I can tell: and following Paul's retirement, he was incredibly supportive in bolstering Julia's career.

Anyway, I already thought Julia Child was fascinating--this only increased my interest. Great piece.

(After having read more of the collection, I think it also worth commenting that it's impossible overestimate the resonance of Mastering the Art of French Cooking--I think that cookbook (and Julia Child/her TV show) are referenced in at least half, if not more, of the pieces throughout the book.)

The Reporter's Kitchen by Jane Kramer (2002)

One of my favorite pieces in the collection by far. Kramer writes a reflection about how cooking has aided her in her writing as a professional journalist throughout her lifetime. Her meditations on the act of cooking as a simultaneous tactile and mental process and her reflections on her life experiences are equally wonderful--she's lead an amazing life and, in its course, eaten and learned to cook some amazing food. There are the 'dream cookies' that she made while working on a story of inter-village bridal feuds in the foothills of the Middle Atlas Mountains in Morocco. The pasta and chocolate sundaes she ate at an awkward dinner at Ed Koch's home while he was mayor of New York City. The "fish grilled by a group of young Portuguese commandos in the early summer of 1974--I covering their revolution; they were taking a break from it--over a campfire on a deserted Cabo de Sao Vicente beach." The "small Thanksgiving turkey, two Christmas rib roasts, and an Easter lamb," that she made one April while struggling with a piece on an Afghan refugee. "Good cooking," she says, "is much easier to master than good writing."

Fishing and Foraging

A Mess of Clams by Joseph Mitchell (1939)

I've enjoyed Joseph Mitchell's writing from Up in the Old Hotel, and I also appreciated his straightforward, unobtrusive, and rich descriptiveness in this essay. Mitchell travels out to Long Island (with a handwritten "note of introduction," which I loved) to join one Captain Clock on his "buy-boat," the Jennie Tucker, from which the Captain buys the day's shellfish from local boatmen each day. The essay has a great narrative flow, and Mitchell's ear for dialog is spot-on.

A Forager by John McPhee (1968)

I was recommended this book because of this essay, so it was the first I read in the collection. A good 40 pages, it follows the author and Euell Theophilus Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus and forager extraordinaire, on a planned foraging trip downriver in Pennsylvania in the late fall/early winter. The piece is wonderful--in part an essay about foraged food, but mostly a nuanced profile of a fascinating man who has lived a fascinating life all over the US (Hawaii, New Mexico, LA, Pennsylvania), foraging for both pleasure and survival.

The Fruit Detective by John Seabrook (2002)

Another great portrait of an eccentric food specialist (David Karp) and the US fruit market in general. Karp, once a wealthy and brilliant young man, succumbed to drug addiction in the 80s and 90s, and recovered, in large part, due to his new found fascination with fruit, which, Seabrook speculates, has become something of a substitute for the heroin of Karp's younger years. He describes Karp peeling a cherimoya: "The focus he brought to the task, the specialized equipment he used, and the obvious tactile pleasure he took in the procedure, combined with the prospect of an imminent mind-blowing experience, were all powerfully reminiscent of the David Karp of twenty years ago."

Gone Fishing by Mark Singer (2005)

I just seem to like these profiles--this another good example, a portrait of David Pasternack, the chef at Esca, an upscale, Italian-style fish restaurant in Manhattan. Although Pasternack spends full days, five or six days a week, in his kitchen, he lives in Long island and does much of the fishing for the restaurant himself.

On the Bay by Bill Buford (2006)

Another profile, this of Mike Osinki, a former businessman turned oyster man in Greenport, Long Island. This is an interesting piece, both for the profile itself and also for the details about how oysters are farmed and distributed to local restaurants. It's a good piece, but I didn't like the writing of this one as much, though, in part because Buford is personally a big presence in the story and I wasn't really that interested in him. He's a bit verbose, a bit faux metaphysical, and kind of irritating in each respect: "...I found myself marveling at the speed with which a creature can be transported from ocean to stomach, dispatched from the dark and deep to--well, the dark and deep," or "But I was left wondering: Is an oyster a primordial meal?" Blah, blah.

Local Delicacies

The Homesick Restaurant by Susan Orlean (1996)

I have a journalist friend who idolizes Orlean, but I've never read any of her work (Orlean's), so I was particularly interested in this one. It's a rambling essay about the Centro Vasco restaurant in Miami, a Basque-style restaurant which has become a gathering place for Cuban expats in the city, and is an almost exact replica of the owner's first restaurant (also the Centro Vasco) in Havana, Cuba. Orlean travels to Cuba to see the original restaurant in the middle of the essay, which adds an interesting layer. I like her writing style a great deal, but as a whole, the piece felt a little 'without' to me. There's a lot of back story, a lot of resonant implications about expatriat life and nostalgia and memory, but I'm not sure the overall effect is as strong as it should be.

The Magic Bagel by Calvin Trillin (2000)

A sweet, personal piece about Trillin's mostly-but-maybe-not-totally farcical attempt to track down the baker of his California-based daughter's favorite, but now unavailable, pumpernickel bagels in an effort to convince her to move back to New York. I'm very glad that Trillin has other pieces in the collection--he's great fun to read.

Raw Faith by Burkhard Bilger (2002)

This piece, about Mother Noella Marcellino (the "cheese nun") and the raw milk cheese she makes at her abbey in Connecticut, was probably inspired by the concurrent culinary dramas surrounding the relatively safety of cheese that has not been pasteurized for 60 days or more. The raw milk question is interesting in its way--and Bilger has a lot of science seamlessly folded in about cultures and bacteria etc--but I was more interested in Mother Noella, who not only spent a year on a Fulbright scholarship studying "the ecology of French cheese caves" but is also obtaining a Ph.D. microbiology. Also, her fellow nuns are also a fascinating group of people as well (several are obtaining Ph.Ds in sciences in order to further their cheese/agricultural research). As Bilger describes:

The abbey is a medieval place with a modern soul. The nuns are worldly and educated. (A number hold advanced degrees; one is a former movie star who gave Elvis his first on-screen kiss.) Yet their living areas are walled off from outsiders, and they sustain themselves on what they can grow and make on their 360-acre farm. Seven Latin services punctuate the day, and in between the nuns work as beekeepers, cowherds, and blacksmiths; they make their own pottery, grow and blend their own herbal teas, raise their own hogs, and sell some of their products in a gift shop.

Night Kitchens by Judith Thurman (2005)

A poetic essay on Thurman's trip to Japan, where she met with several master tofu-makers who each undertake painstaking, time consuming, heritage processes to make their own unique kinds of tofu. "When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese."

It's certainly an interesting topic, but for whatever reason, this one didn't really do it for me.

The Pour

Dry Martini by Roger Angell (2002)

A nice, short history of the martini and its cultural cache throughout the years.

The Red and the White by Calvin Trillin (2002)

I didn't like this as much as his bagel piece, but its still rather fun. Trillin tries to suss out whether a notorious study--in which people with a knowledge of wine were asked to identify whether a wine they drank out of black glasses was red or white, and routinely failed at this task--was actually conducted at UC Davis. (It probably didn't, or at least, not exactly.) He then replicates the test himself.

The Russian God by Victor Erofeyev (2002)

Another well done cultural history--this time of vodka, and its place in the Russian imagination (and history). Erofeyev waxes a little too poetic on occasion, but overall, very good.

Tastes Funny

Two Menus by Steve Martin (2000)

A menu from a fictional restaurant in Paducah, Kansas (King's Ransom); a menu from a fictional restaurant in Beverly Hills, California (Synergy). Martin's not one for subtle jokes, but a few of the entries were pretty funny.

The Zagat History of My Last relationship by Noah Baumbach (2002)

A funny idea and format that wasn't executed as well as it could be.

Small Plates

Bock by William Shawn (1934)

A good topic for a short-form piece--the annual release of German bock beer, and some fun origin anecdotes--but not enough orienting details. It starts, "Shortly now, pictures of goats will be hung up in drinking places and bock beer will make its traditional spring appearance for the first time in fourteen years." (This was written in 1934, it bears noting.) I'm not sure what city this takes place in (I suppose we can assume New York), or more of the background. It's only a two page piece, so maybe there wasn't space, but a little more context would have been useful, I think.

Slave by Alex Prud'Homme (1989)

A satisfying short profile of Albert Yeganeh, the real-life "Soup Nazi" (as he was dubbed in his fictional representation on Seinfeld). Good snippet:

"My regular customers don't say anything. They are very intelligent and well educated. they know I'm just trying to move the line. The New York cop is very smart--he sees everything but says nothing. But the young girl who wants to stop and tell you how nice you look and hold everything up--yah!" He made a guillotining motion with his hand.

Under the Hood by Mark Singer (1989)

Singer takes a drive uptown with Chris Maynard, one of the authors of Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine. It's appropriately quirky, but doesn't really deal with Maynard's engine-cooking much. He puts a foil package of veal scaloppine on the engine of his 1988 Ford Taurus at the beginning of the piece, but then it becomes more about their jaunt to Tony's, "an Italian-owned place that serves Jewish food as well as Italian to a mainly Irish clientele" and home of the corned beef doughnut. Still fun--and there are engine-cooking anecdotes sprinkled throughout--but the piece has a little less focus than maybe it should.

Protein Source by Mark Singer (1992)

If the setting of the piece were different, Singer and his fellow guests (all characters) might be the central point of interest of this piece--there's a lot of journalists/The Media versus pest control agencies dialog that is weird for its level of venom. (Like, who would have thought that an exterminator from Queens would, as a pest control professional, have cause for such negative feelings against the press: "We do our best to treat them [the press] as nontarget organisms. As exterminators, we tend to target only four-legged, six-legged, and, on occasion, eight-legged organisms. We don't normally go after two-legged creatures, although, if you were really interested, I could set you up with someone."

However, since this piece takes place at the New York Entomological Society hundredth anniversary dinner, at which all of the dishes are insects--"cricket-and-vegetable tempura, mealworm balls in zesty tomato sauce, roasted Australian kurrajong grubs..."--the interpersonal dynamic is a bit distracting. But maybe that's for the best--I am not culinarily enlightened enough to be able to read about people eating a fancy bug dinner without feeling a little green. Especially when the piece ends with the guests selecting two-inch Thai Water Bugs (a cockroach by any other name...) from a buffet table.

A Sandwich by Nora Ephron (2002)

Basically, a pitch for the pastrami sandwich at Langer's Delicatessen in Los Angeles. The sandwich sounds very tasty, the piece itself was just okay.

Sea Urchin by Chang-Rae Lee (2002)

A memoir-style short essay about a trip that Lee took to Seoul in 1980 when he was fifteen. I remember reading this one for some reason--I was going through a phase with Lee's novels and essays for awhile, so maybe that's why--and I definitely enjoyed it the second time, although probably not as much as the first. The ending is a bit too heavy-handed with the emotional resonance.

As the French Do by Janet Malcolm (2002)

Another one with a quirky premise that kind of comes out of nowhere. Malcolm opens with a quote out of the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (from the recipe for 'Hearts of Artichokes a la Isman Bavaldy') an opaque, strangely written instruction about holding an asparagus spear upright as you build a "wall of sauce" around it that is supposed to hold it up. I'm not sure what the impetus for writing about her experiment with this strange recipe was, although there is a nice section about Malcolm's first experience cooking from the book--seven years before the publication of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she reminds us--when Malcolm was "stunned by suave deliciousness of what [she] had produced." (Coq a vin, or Cock in Wine.) She then reprints both the original Toklas recipe and her own "sort of hovering Jewish mother's version."

It's a bit muddled as an essay, but still interesting, which maybe I'm starting to realize is a New Yorker thing? Esoteric, kind of random, personality-heavy narrative essays?

Blocking and Chowing by Ben McGrath (2002)

I really liked this piece--it's just the right subject matter for the length (2 pages) and it conveys the main subject's (Randy Thomas, offensive lineman for the New York Jets) personality and voice well in the context of the larger milieu (the free, all-you-can-eat cafeteria at the Jets annual training camp). the funniest part is certainly where the players discuss several of their favorite restaurants. "Major's Steak House, on Long Island, is one favorite, and East-West, an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, is another; Thomas ran afoul of the management in East-West two years ago when he put away sixteen lobster tails. ("I've fucked up some buffets, man," Thomas says.)"

When Edibles Attack by Rebecca Mead (2003)

Another fancy dinner profile piece--this one at the Food Allergy Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 2003. It does a good job of presenting the milieu early on: "The guests...were drawn from that class of New York society which includes Fortune 500 CEOs and senior partners at corporate law firms and exclusive interior decorators: the fortunate few who are largely sheltered from many of life's afflictions. But food allergies...can strike even the most pampered New Yorkers, and, more significantly, the children of the most pampered New Yorkers, for whom a rogue peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the lunchroom can present a deadly threat." However, it's just not that interesting a subject (to me) somehow, and the dinner they congratulate themselves on ("cit[ing] 'the right to have a fine culinary experience without fear'") doesn't really sound that great.

Killing Dinner by Gabrielle Hamilton (2004)

A well-written and evocative, if visceral, memoir-style piece about Hamilton's first experience killing a chicken. (I'm not sure who Hamilton is--I really wish there was an author appendix in this collection--but she apparently is now very well-versed in the process of slaughtering and butchering livestock.) "There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive, and learn how to kill a chicken."

[Shirley Kingery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has something for everyone who's interested in food, it's preparation, those who prepare it, origins of certain dishes, and so much more! These food related articles span many years of The New Yorker magazine's publication. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of restaurants and chefs in far off countries and the food they prepared.

The stories cover a broad expanse in time and distance. There are a series of fiction stories at the end of the book and those offered a wide variety as well. I learned much--from the origin of buffalo wings to the practice of creating raw cheeses (by a nun with a Ph.D. in the subject and the world's foremost expert on this subject). The articles on the exotic fruit expert and famed buyer of same, and a reflection on the difference between white and red wine and the concept that often experts can't even tell the difference in blind tests were also quite interesting. Both of those stories had a tie-in to my home state (California), and in the case of the fruit buyer even referred to a family in California (who are kind of produce royalty) which includes (by marriage) a cousin of mine, whose amazing mansion I can still recall visiting as a child.

A thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining read!

[Jess Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Individual stories and articles ranged from 2-5 stars...one I couldn't finish and skipped it. But overall I found this collection greatly educational and entertaining. Yes, I cried listening to The Butcher's Wife. And yes, I will find a way to print 'A Forager.' and share it with all my friends.

My favorites:
Don't Eat Before Reading This
A Really Big Lunch
Fishing and Foraging - a Mess of Clams
A Forager.
Ketchup conundrum
Tastes Funny - But the One on the Right
4 AM
Slave
There Should Be a Name For It
The Butchers Wife

Big downside: this collection is very Eurocentric. Even when articles and stories aren't just about the apparent glories of Paris and its chefs, I think there's only one story about (and/or written by) a person of color, and only a few not about Western European/ American food.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

SECRET INGREDIENTS is filled with New Yorker writers differing reactions to this basic and universally valued sense, TASTING.

Most of the submissions were enjoyable. Other than the fiction, I enjoyed most of the articles I chose to read. For decades, the New Yorker satisfied my hunger to understand the world. But that phase of my life (thank goodness) ended 20 years ago. Reading this book reminded me of the depth (or lack thereof) of my knowledge at that time. It also was a bit like sitting in your favorite chair when you are in college: a little bit of good, some great, some boring and some not worth experiencing.

[Stuart Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lively and entertaining collection of articles on food, wine and liquor from the New Yorker magazine dating from the 1930s through the early 2000s. Steve Martin's "Two Menus" and Dorothy Parker's "But the One on the Right" are but two of the gems along with pieces by S.J. Perelman, A.J. Liebling, M.F.K. Fisher, John McPhee, Calvin Trillin, Janet Malcolm and many others. An added bonus: it's illustrated with New Yorker cartoons on the topic.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays and short stories that appeared in The New Yorker over the last 80+ years. Obviously, the common theme was food and drink. Most were very interesting & extremely well written. The essays were better than most of the fiction. This book did get a little long … I think it was 25 audio hours.

[Arrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Selected articles, including MFK Fisher, and cartoons - yes, Roz Chast! - from the annals of New Yorker magazine. It is what it says it is - anyone who likes food writing in the New Yorker style will enjoy it.

[Weixiao Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of all these New Yorker writers over all these years, Joseph Mitchell, AJ Liebling and Calvin Trillin are still my favorite. There are other familiar writers in this collection that are a pleasure to bump into.

[Jo Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed dipping into the many essays in this book and, as with all good food writing, I often came away hungry for equally good food. Also, this was the book where I had to avail myself of the e-reader's built-in dictionary the most number of times.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Good food is a benign weapon against the sodden way we live." - Jim Harrison, "A Really Big Lunch"

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read three stories in this collection. I was mainly interested in John McPhee's story titled "A Forager". This is a great read for those who love food. Well written and entertaining .