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.

As a foodie, New Yorker fan, and lover of good writing (I'm a professional journalist/writer), this turned out to be one of my favorite books of ALL TIME. This book represented so many different eras in food and culture. A masterful collection of the best food essays and articles ever written.

I've only just started to work my way through the book, but it has been a delight. It is especially pleasurable to read the pieces written long before I began reading the New Yorker, but re-reading old favorites is a joy as well.

This book is overall pretty good. However, some of the articles (especially the older ones) are pretentious and not all that great. There are a wide variety of writing styles, and I feel that most readers will be happier if they just skip some of the articles.

I gave this book as a gift to my husband. I was happy to find he loves it. He commented about how he enjoyed being able to skip around from one essay to another. He enjoys the variety of the essays from so many diverse authors. And of course, the fact that this book was edited by David Remnick is always a plus.

Witty, insightful and you can pick it up anytime for a good read. A must for the beside or a carry-on for that long flight. The best of the New Yorker is simply the best you can get.

Vic W