Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink Audiobook (Free)

Since its earliest days, The New Yorker is a tastemaker-literally. As the house of the. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg, and M. F. K. Fisher, who practically invented American meals writing, the newspaper established a tradition that is transported forwards today by irrepressible literary gastronomes including Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Adam Gopnik, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. Now, in this essential collection, THE BRAND NEW Yorker meals up a feast of delicious composing on drink and food, from about Top secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Publication of Drink and food every age group of its fabled eighty-year history. A couple of memoirs, short tales, tell-alls, and poems-ranging in firmness from lovely to sour and in subject from soup to nuts.

M. F. K. Fisher pays homage to “cookery witches,” those incomprehensible cooks who possess “an uncanny power over meals,” while John McPhee valiantly paths an inveterate forager and it is rewarded with stewed persimmons and white-pine-needle tea. There is Roald Dahl’s well-known story “Taste,” in which a wines snob’s palate will come in for some unwelcome scrutiny, and Julian Barnes’s clever tale of the lifelong gourmand who continues on a very peculiar diet for still even more peculiar reasons. Adam Gopnik asks if French cuisine is performed for, and Calvin Trillin investigates whether people can in fact flavor the difference between burgandy or merlot wine and white. We trip with Susan Orlean as she distills the fact 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 previous New York tradition from the beefsteak dinner, and Mark Vocalist shadows the city’s most important fisherman-chef. Selected in the magazine’s abundant larder, SECRET INGREDIENTS celebrates all forms of gustatory delight.