Secret Ingredients

I thumbed through a New Yorker at lunch today.

Several recent issues have had ads for a book called "Secret Ingredients...the New Yorker Book of Food and Drink." It's a compilation of all forms of humor pieces, cartoons, short stories, etc., from every age of the New Yorker.

Many of the chapters are by some of my favorite writers. Every title is interesting and provocative and begins with "On.." Only they call the chapters "The Menu." Here are a few of my favorites:

Noah Baumbach..................on the Zagat history of my last relationship

John Cheever...................on the sorrows of gin

Jim Harrison.....................on his thirty-seven-course lunch

Woody Allen..................on dieting the Dostoyevsky way

S. J. Perelman.....................on a hollandaise assassin

Steve Martin........................on menu mores

Alice McDermott......................on sex and ice cream



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