Books: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink

 

This is the kind of book that you can pick up and open at random to find something interesting to read. It's a collection of essays that have appeared in The New Yorker, a magazine that has been published since 1925. Some of the essays go back almost that far.

Dorothy Parker's piece (from 1929) on being stuck next to a dullard at a dinner party is something we can all relate to.

Other essays are a fascinating glimpse into what life was like back in the old days, before fat was a four-letter word. In Joseph Mitchell's 1939 piece, "All You Can Hold for Five Bucks", he writes about beefsteaks, New York steak feasts that were well-established by the 1920s.