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3.5 

Secret Ingredients

By David Remnick
Secret Ingredients by David Remnick digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The New Yorker dishes up a feast of delicious writing–food and drink memoirs, short stories, tell-alls, and poems, seasoned with a generous dash of cartoons.

“To read this sparely elegant, moving portrait is to remember that writing well about food is really no different from writing well about life.”—Saveur (Ten Best Books of the Year)
 
Since its earliest days, The New Yorker has been a tastemaker—literally. In this indispensable collection, M.F.K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those mysterious cooks who possess “an uncanny power over food,” and Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is done for. 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.
 
Selected from the magazine’s plentiful larder, Secret Ingredients celebrates all forms of gustatory delight. A sample of the menu:
 
Roger Angell on the art of the martini • Don DeLillo on Jell-O • Malcolm Gladwell on building a better ketchup • Jane Kramer on the writer’s kitchen • Chang-rae Lee on eating sea urchin • Steve Martin on menu mores • Alice McDermott on sex and ice cream • Dorothy Parker on dinner conversation • S. J. Perelman on a hollandaise assassin • Calvin Trillin on New York’s best bagel
 
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 The New Yorker’s fabled history are sure to satisfy every taste.

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8 Reviews

3.5
“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.”

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