

Secret Ingredients
The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
Author: David Remnick
Narrator: Various
Unabridged: 24 hr 58 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: 12/04/2007
Categories: Nonfiction, Cooking, Humor
Synopsis
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.