Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

· Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Various
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24 hr 57 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

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 the author

David Remnick was born on October 29, 1958 in Hackensack, N.J. and educated at Princeton University. He began his career at the Washington Post in 1982. In 1992, he became a staff writer for the New Yorker. Remnick's book, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction. The work deals with the last days of the Soviet Union, which Remnick witnessed firsthand as foreign correspondent to Moscow from the Washington Post. Remnick is the author of numerous other works including The Devil Problem (And Other True Stories) published in 1996, Resurrection, The Struggle for a New Russia in 1997, and King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero, published in 1998. His most recent title, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, was published in 2010.

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