Something I don’t take advantage of nearly enough as a New Yorker subscriber is the ability to sift through their 85-year-strong archive on the magazine’s website. The other day, I was reading Roger Angell’s great essay/memoir “Dry Martini” in Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink (a book that combines many of my interests) and I thought I’d look it up online so I could send it to a friend.
Sadly, the article wasn’t available for non-subscribers (you can read one of their incredibly detailed abstracts though—who writes/edits these?), so I checked out the original issue itself, via my magical subscriber powers. It’s pretty cool; you see the issue as it was printed, with original layouts, ads, and everything. (Incidentally, it’s amazing how fast print ads look incredibly dated.)
What struck me though, was how great this Aug. 19 & 26, 2002 “Food Issue” was. I mean, this is an epic issue. First off, there’s the Angell piece, which veers from King George VI and F.D.R. sharing martinis on the eve of WWII to Angell himself, sipping one at the same time, then aged 18, to watching The Philadelphia Story in the movie theater during its first run, to the Pacific theater of war where Angell was a pilot, to “entire families, two or three generations, who seemed bent on destroying themselves with booze,” to Angell’s own great recipe for the cocktail.
You should read that piece; it’s fantastic. So what else? John Seabrook’s fascinating “The Fruit Detective,” about mythical ex-heroin addict and eccentric fruit hunter David Karp, a story that would go on to impact my life in ways I could only have imagined when I first read it (and which I’ll explain some other time). Alma Guillermoprieto’s story about Diane Kennedy.
There’s also Calvin Trillin’s hilarious “The Red and the White,” about a possibly-apocryphal study indicating that most people, and even wine experts, couldn’t tell the difference between red and white wine. And last but not least, Bill Buford’s “The Secret of Excess,” his profile of celebrity chef Mario Batali that would turn out to be the seed of his great book Heat, about a year he spent working in the kitchen of Babbo.
Rediscovering this was like finding a Holy Grail of modern food writing. Best single New Yorker issue ever?
