Editorial Reviews

Book 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.

Customer Reviews

Seventy Years of Great Writing about Dining Out, Food, Beverages, and Dieting by Donald Mitchell
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!

A Sumptuous Buffet by P. Duggan
Like a lengthy, varied meal, this book offers frothy appetizers, serious main courses and sweet, cloying desserts.

Highly recommend to any lover of good food and wine and good writing.

The droll cartoons add a hint of spice to the mix.

Secret Ingredients book by S. Ellis
Love this book as I do all New Yorker things. Got it for my daughter for Christmas but I’m reading it first! It will have to be for her birthday next November. Don’t look Danielle!

A marvelous book for my climbing machine. by Robert C. Ross

What a great lineup:

Woody Allen on dieting the Dostoevsky way.

John Cheever on the sorrows of gin.

Don DeLillo on Jell-O.

Steve Martin on menu mores.

Alice McDermott on sex and ice cream.

Joseph Mitchell on beefsteak clubs of New York.

Dorothy Parker on dinner conversation.

Calvin Trillin on the “magic” bagel.

Nora Ephron on a hot pastrami sandwich.

Calvin Tomkins on Julia Child.

Malcolm Gladwell on ketchup.

M.F.K. Fisher on tripe.

Roald Dahl’s “Taste” is here, with its story of a keen eyed maid and a wine lover with doubtful ethics, able to toss off some excellent tasting notes:

“A prudent wine, rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.

“A good humoured wine, benevolent and cheerful - slightly obscene, perhaps, but nonetheless good humoured.

“A very interesting little wine - gentle and gracious, almost feminine in the after taste.”

Interspersed are delightful, funny, sometimes baffling cartoons, typical of “The New Yorker’s” taste.

It’s amazing to the casual foodie like myself how intense some people can get about food, how deeply Mrs. Fisher has thought about the casserole for example.

Trillin has a fascinating piece about the history of chicken wings; here’s a short extract, a nibble of the delights on offer:

“About two years ago, a Buffalo stockbroker named Robert M. Budin wrote a piece for the Courier-Express Sunday magazine suggesting, in a light-hearted way, that the city adopt the chicken wing as its symbol. Budin’s piece begins with two Buffalonians discussing what had happened when one of them was at a party in Memphis and was asked by a local where he was from. Deciding to “take him face on,” the visiting Buffalonian had said, “I’m from Buffalo.” Instead of asking if the snow had melted yet, the local had said, “Where those dynamite chicken wings come from?”

“You mean positive recognition?” the friend who is hearing the story asks. It becomes obvious to the two of them that Buffalonians should “mount a campaign to associate Buffalo with chicken wings and rid ourselves of the negatives of snow and cold and the misunderstood beef-on-weck.” Budin suggested that the basketball team be called the Buffalo Wings, that the mayor begin wearing a button that says “Do Your Thing with Wings,” and that a huge statue of a chicken wing (medium hot) be placed in the convention Center.”

An absolutely delightful banquet for anyone with the least interest in food.

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