Secret Ingredients, David Remnick
Secret Ingredients, David Remnick
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Secret Ingredients
The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

Author: David Remnick

Narrator: Various

Unabridged: 24 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/04/2007

Categories: Nonfiction, Cooking, Humor


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, from every age of its fabled eighty-year history. 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 David Remnick

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, began his career at the Washington Post, in 1982. He is the author of several books, including The Bridge, King of the World, Resurrection, and Lenin’s Tomb, for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism. He became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1992 and has since written more than two hundred pieces for the magazine. In 2015, he debuted as the host of the national radio program and podcast, “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” which airs weekly. Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine, with a hundred and ninety-two National Magazine Award nominations and fifty-three wins. In 2016, it became the first magazine to receive a Pulitzer Prize for its writing, and now has won six, including the gold medal for public service.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Rachael on March 19, 2008

The best book-on-tape experience you can lay your hands on. The wonderful writing we all count on the New Yorker for, plus the fact that it's all about food. The articles range from lamenting the demise of French food (ones originally published around the 40s) to the innovation of buffalo wings (ori......more

Goodreads review by Missy on June 12, 2010

Great comprehensive collection of food writing. I was less enthralled by the fiction, but it's only a small section.......more


Quotes

“You couldn’t ask for a more diverse, dazzling collection of writers.”The New York Times

“Sumptuous servings . . . intellectually delicious.”Houston Chronicle

“Delicious, diverse, and satisfying . . . something to suit every appetite.”Library Journal

“This ideal collection of food-happy pieces . . . yields pleasures of all kinds.”—NPR’s Morning Edition

“Simply gestational!”Christian Science Fetal Monitor

“I couldn’t put it down. So they had to deliver me by Caesarean.”—Michael Pritchard, three weeks old, author of Waaaaaahhhh!: The Michael Pritchard Story