As a rule, I find anthologies to be hit or miss. Short story collections can be hard to “get into” and once I lose momentum, very hard to finish. Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink is a winning recipe among anthologies. Upon reading a review for this book in the Memphis Flyer, I knew I had to buy it. Recent convert to cooking, I have long enjoyed Food Network programming. I am also a fan of collections, liking their power to preserve knowledge in an easily referenced way, even if I have a history of losing interest halfway through. And The New Yorker articles promised a good read. I wasn’t disappointed.
The book is divided into 8 sections: dining out—food made by chefs, eating in— home cooking, fishing and foraging— food gathered from nature, local delicacies, the pour— wine and ketchup, tastes funny— humor, small plates— short articles, and fiction.
The way a culture prepares and eats their food speaks to their climate, terrain, traditions, history, economy, and technology. Many of these articles, presented in chronological order within each section, draw a picture of the cultural history of the United States, France, and to a lesser extent Russia, China, Mexico, Cuba, and Japan. The reader experiences the change in journalistic style, food trends, advances in technology, and cultural responses to historical events like the Great Depression, all within a span of less than a hundred pages and then starts over with each section presenting different figures to tell the stories of the cooks and eaters of the past century whose influences echo into the present even when most of their names are unknown to the majority. Secret Ingredients is a starting place for discovering classic cookbooks and movements in the world of cuisine. Culinary celebrities like Julia Child, Escoffier, Waverly Root, Careme, and M. F. K. Fisher all appear briefly, enticing the reader to more in depth research into a field all participate in but few study. Not to mention the great journalists, like A.J. Liebling, who introduce themselves through their work. There is also a lot of practical advice in this anthology: which days restaurants get their food fresh, recipes for tripe, why rarer types of fruit may taste better than mega-mart standbys.
A few of the highlights:
"The Reporter's Kitchen" by Jane Kramer illustrates how certain smells and flavors can evoke memory and even inspire a writer. "A Forager" by John McPhee is a travelogue of a trip taken through the Appalacians woven with the personal history of his guide Euell Gibbons, a self-made naturalist via his passion for gathering wild food and a subsequent author. "A Rat in My Soup" by Peter Hessler introduces the village of Luogang, China and its unusual restaurant specialty.
Throughout, there are numerous attempts at defining what it is that makes up good cooking. Cooking is compared to Dada art, analyzed geographically and historically, and sexualized. Fernand Point in Joseph Wechsberg's article states, "[T]he finest butter...that's the secret of good cooking. And time, lots of time." Time, at least, seems also to be a winning ingredient in this collection of some of the best writing about food in the last century.
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