Secret Ingredients

T
o his colleagues, Harold Ross, the founding editor of
The New Yorker,
was a tireless editorial engine fueled by a steady diet of high anxiety and unfiltered cigarettes. But while the magazine over the years employed its share of gourmands (Alexander Woollcott, A. J. Liebling), Ross himself was of circumscribed appetite. For the fun of it, he had a $3,500 stake in the famous Los Angeles hangout run by his friend Dave Chasen—he provided suggestions on everything from proofreading the menu to the optimal way to brine a turkey—and yet his own diet was abstemious. It wasn’t his fault. Ross suffered from debilitating ulcers. Stress, particularly the stress of inventing
The New Yorker,
keeping it afloat during the Depression, and then elaborating its original principles into a literary and commercial success, was his perpetual state, warm milk and hot broth his diet. On this meager nourishment, he kept himself going. He was shambling, stooped, and in no way an athlete, yet he was strong enough for the job. As E. B. White once said, Ross was “an Atlas who lacked muscle tone.”

Some limited salvation came to Ross’s innards when he befriended Sara Murray Jordan, a renowned gastroenterologist at the Lahey Clinic in Boston. Thanks to Dr. Jordan, Ross’s ulcer pain eased somewhat and he even began to eat his share of solid foods. Ross’s gut, an unerring, if pained, precinct, now provided him with yet another editorial idea: Dr. Jordan was not only a superb physician but a competent cook, and so Ross put her together with his culinary expert at the magazine, Sheila Hibben, and bid them to collaborate on a recipe compendium for the gastrointestinally challenged, to be called “Good Food for Bad Stomachs.” In his first bylined piece since his days as a newspaperman during the First World War, Ross contributed an introduction that began, “I write as a duodenum-scarred veteran of many years of guerrilla service in the Hydrochloric War.” Ross also paid tribute to Dr. Jordan, who at dinner one night urged him to pass on his usual fruit compote and to try the digestively more daring
meringue glacée.

“Now
meringue glacée
has a French name, which is bad, and it is an ornamental concoction, which is bad,” Ross wrote. “Although I regard it as essentially a sissy proposition and nothing for a full-grown man to lose his head over, I have it now and then when I’m in the ulcer victim’s nearest approach to a devil-may-care mood.”

Ross’s longtime deputy and eventual successor, William Shawn, neither smoked nor drank and enjoyed relatively good health to the end of a long life, yet he, too, is recalled by his colleagues not only for his editorial intelligence and preternatural generosity but also for his curious modesty at table. At his regular lunches with writers at the Algonquin Hotel, Shawn would usually order nothing more than a slice of toasted pound cake (and barely touch it) or a bowl of cornflakes in milk (and leave the flakes floating). His interest was solely with the writer across the table.

While Ross and Shawn did not distinguish themselves as
fressers,
they did build a magazine that welcomed some of the greatest eaters and also some of the greatest writers
about
eating who have ever picked up pen or fork. This anthology comprises those men and women of appetite and their successors, writers who have taken an interest in food and drink as a source of pleasure, sustenance, metaphor, portraiture, adventure, comedy, and fiction.

A. J. Liebling, who came to the magazine in 1935 from the
New York World-Telegram,
was surely the first among equals in the field. Liebling’s food writing was as much about memory as it was about food, and his last book,
Between Meals,
which appeared serially in the magazine, was a memoir about the Paris of his youth. Paris, for him, was the capital of pleasure. “There would come a time,” he wrote, “when if I had compared my life to a cake, the sojourns in Paris would have presented the chocolate filling. The intervening layers were plain sponge.”

Like so many of his models, Rabelais included, Liebling was a prodigious writer—life being short, he valued speed and volume; he used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster and faster than anyone who wrote better—but his indulgences away from the desk exacted a price. He died at the age of fifty-nine. His
Times
obituary remarked, “Mr. Liebling bore the marks of the gourmet: an extended waistline and rosy cheeks. ‘I used to be shy about ordering a steak after I had eaten a steak sandwich,’ he once said, ‘but I got used to it.’”

Liebling habitually apprenticed himself to a cast of elders: in boxing to the trainer Whitey Bimstein, in writing to Camus and Pierce Egan, and, in the restaurants of Paris, to a playwright and heroic eater of his acquaintance, Yves Mirande, who often presided at a favorite restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin. In “A Good Appetite,” one of the many full plates served up here, Liebling recalls Mirande’s admirable capacities and, in doing so, provides a catalogue of particulars no less vivid than Homer’s ships and a seminar on the virtues (however fleeting) of abandon. Mirande, Liebling wrote, would “dazzle” his fellow diners “by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose
sauce Nantua,
a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few
langoustes
and a turbot—and, of course, a fine
civet
made from the
marcassin,
or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. ‘And while I think of it,’ I once heard him say, ‘we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.’”

It is unclear whether Liebling could write faster than Proust, and certainly he could not write better, but he did dare a gibe at the master by mock-wondering if perhaps
In Search of Lost Time
would have been improved had its author fed on a heartier stimulus than the bland madeleine. “On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.” It was in the same spirit of gastronomic challenge that one of Liebling’s heroes, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, addressed Adam and Eve: “First parents of the human race…you lost all for an apple, what would you not have done for a truffled turkey?”

Adam Gopnik, one of our chief epicures, once wrote that food writing can usually be broken down into the “mock epic” and the “mystical microcosm.” If Liebling was the master of the mock epic, his inheritors surely include Calvin Trillin, who goes out in search of the “magic” bagel, the perfect barbecued mutton, dim sum good enough to impress Mao Zedong. And just as Liebling insisted that the true eater subsist on a limited budget (the principle being that it takes no skill at all to walk into Le Bernardin armed with a corporate credit card), Trillin declares Kansas City his Paris and insists (as an inveterate beer drinker) that positively no one, not even the most devoted oenophile, can, in a blindfold test, tell the difference between red wine and white. Although his research is done with reliable professors in the Napa Valley, Trillin warns the reader, “I have never denied that when I’m trying to select a bottle of wine in a liquor store I’m strongly influenced by the picture on the label. (I like a nice mountain, preferably in the middle distance.)” Trillin has pursued American vernacular cuisine with the reporting energy of Seymour Hersh and the deadpan panache of Stan Laurel. The morning after bingeing on Buffalo chicken wings with a local expert, “I got out my preliminary research notes for analysis. They amounted to three sentences I was unable to make out, plus what appeared to be a chicken-wing stain.”

M.F.K. Fisher is an exemplar of the mystical school, in which the secrets of life, of survival, of the nature of time and generational knowledge, are found in a clear-eyed concentration on the stuff of life, the things we eat—or should. In “The Secret Ingredient,” she talks about the cooks of her acquaintance who have been in possession of seemingly magical properties. What was the secret of Bertie Bastalizzo’s dumplings and casseroles? What of Fisher’s mother’s mustard pickles? “Where are the witches of yesteryear, the strange old women with their dogged involvement, their loyalty to true flavor and changeless quality?”

And yet it is hard, as one considers the many profiles, travel pieces, literary essays, personal memoirs, short stories, and poems assembled here in
Secret Ingredients,
to limit the categories to the mock epic or the mystical. Roger Angell’s rumination on the perfect martini is personal, domestic, and sharp—mock epic
and
mystical—where Viktor Erofeyev’s essay on “the Russian god,” vodka, is a way of seeing (hazily) the history and psychology of a vast country, Dostoyevsky in a glass or straight from the bottle. Pursuing food is often a means of exploring a place and its inhabitants; this was certainly true of Liebling’s great confederate Joseph Mitchell, who loved to roam the quays and fish markets of southern Manhattan and Long Island. Mitchell ordinarily put the focus on characters, on others, but he was not averse to determined personal research, the risk of hepatitis be damned: “One Sunday afternoon in August 1937, I placed third in a clam-eating tournament at a Block Island clambake, eating eighty-four cherries.” This, Mitchell says, was “one of the few worthwhile achievements of my life.” In the same spirit, Susan Orlean gets to know the Cubans by visiting the Centro Vasco in Havana; Bill Buford, a participatory eater and reporter in the mold of George Plimpton, roams the Long Island beaches with its finest oystermen; Peter Hessler, a resident of Beijing for many years, eats rat in rural China and
likes
it; Adam Gopnik, who appraises “the role of food as anxious social theatre,” takes the temperature of contemporary French culture, its insularity and reaction to world trends, by reporting on the high-end kitchens of Paris; Calvin Tomkins describes a coming revolution in American taste by portraying an unlikely revolutionary, the emerging Julia Child; and John McPhee’s profile of Euell Gibbons, who forces his portraitist to eat boiled dandelions and much worse, portends the coming of the natural-foods movement.

Sometimes writers go too far in advertising the difficulty of their craft, but here the writers concentrate on crafts beyond their doing: Burkhard Bilger on ecclesiastical cheesemaking; Malcolm Gladwell on the corporate creation of a condiment; Judith Thurman on the making of artisanal tofu (“an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate”) by a group of Kyoto monks; John Seabrook on the hunt for exotic fruit; and Gabrielle Hamilton on the art of slaughtering a chicken.

One New York chef, Anthony Bourdain, takes us into the kitchen and, whether we want to know or not, gives us a glimpse of the reality of a cook’s life: “the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze.” He even warns us that “the good stuff comes in on Tuesday: the seafood is fresh, the supply of prepared food is new, and the chef, presumably, is relaxed after his day off.” Another word to the wise: the most “unlovely piece of steak—tough, riddled with nerve and connective tissue, off the hip end of the loin, and maybe a little stinky from age” is put into the category of “save for well-done.”

As one reads these pieces, it becomes possible to discern recurring character traits, especially the dictatorial nature of the celebrity chef. Joseph Wechsberg’s subject, the legendary French cook Fernand Point, “has thrown out American millionaires and French ex-ministers when he didn’t feel like serving them” ditto Alex Prud’homme’s Manhattan autocrat, the
Seinfeld
-era Soup Nazi. Over the years, the literature of food, particularly its manuals, has also captivated our writers: Jane Kramer describes how she cooks particular recipes in order to prime herself to write, and Anthony Lane surveys the classic cookbooks, which “should ideally tell you almost everything but not all that you need to know, leaving a tiny crack of uncertainty that can become your own personal abyss.”

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