Books |
Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink
David Remnick (editor)
By
Published: Nov 05, 2009
Category:
Food and Wine
The best book A.J. Liebling wrote is Between Meals. He had it right. If you like food — cooking, eating, thinking about cooking and eating — there are three times a day when the stars align. Filling the rest of the day is a challenge.
David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker. He is also — somehow — a prolific writer. So busy is he that that I picture him inhaling a yogurt at his desk. Or chugging a can of Ensure at meal time. Not, you’d think, a guy who cares much about food.
And yet, here he is, editing Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, a collection of food pieces, cartoons, stories and poems — everything except recipes — from seventy years of The New Yorker that runs to nearly 600 pages. It is gluttony, pure and simple. No one could possibly read it cover to cover without stopping. It’s just too rich.
Remick’s pacing is demonic. Instead of starting you off with some stuffed mushrooms or smoked salmon on squares of toast, he begins with Joe Mitchell’s account of a “beefsteak”, that venerable, all-male gorge on slices of steak dipped in a rich sauce of melted butter, drippings and a dash of Worcestershire. The beef is served on a piece of bread and accompanied by pitchers of beer. The dose is administered until the diner has consumed about five pounds of beef.
Next up is a piece about butter, which is the glue that binds most of the recipes in a little-known but extraordinary restaurant seventeen miles south of Lyon.
Then we arrive at two of Liebling’s chronicles of legendary eaters and meals in the Paris of the 1920s, which should send you to his book for more.
Because you may be starting to feel as pumped up on rich food as a Michelin man, here comes Adam Gopnik to bring you down with a report on the crisis in French cooking. Reality continues with Anthony Bourdain: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay.” Better you shouldn’t know what goes on in a restaurant kitchen. Then…boomerang! Next up is Jim Harrison’s piece about a lunch that runs for 37 courses — it ends at midnight — without any apology for excess. “Good food,” he concludes, “is a benign weapon against the sodden way we live.”
Just when you’re starting to wonder about that 70-year range, Remnick presents three pieces by M.F.K. Fisher, Calvin Tomkins on the youngish Julia Child and Anthony Lane on the just-famous Martha Stewart. Food in the wild? There are pieces on clams, oysters and mushrooms. Calvin Trillin investigates the origin of chicken wings in Buffalo and pumpernickel bagels.
Liquor is as important — in our country, anyway — as food, so there are Valentines to the martini, wine and Russian vodka. Could you have lived without Malcolm Gladwell on ketchup? (I think not.) And there are cartoons, humor pieces and fiction.
You won’t be hungry when you set this book down. But in a few hours….
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