Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

February 10, 2020 Issue


Two of my favorite dishes – lasagna and tiramisu – figure in Hannah Goldfield’s excellent “Tables For Two: Leo,” in this week’s issue. Of lasagna, she writes,

At Leo, you can order a gorgeous slab of it: pillowy layers of thin noodles, stretchy provola cheese, and bright, tart marinara, with a bit of bite from crackly edges and the finely chopped blanched kale folded into the sauce. 

Mm, I’ll have a slice of that, please. As for tiramisu, Goldfield writes two descriptions, one of a tiramisu that she associates with “the kind of red-sauce joint whose charmingly chintzy atmosphere is more alluring than its food”:

It seemed too often to be a stodgy, compacted mass of ladyfingers and mascarpone cream, chalky with cocoa powder and flavorless but for blunt hits of Marsala wine and coffee, as if it were trying to sober itself up.

And the other is a description of Leo’s tiramisu:

Leo’s version comes in a fluted glass tumbler that showcases its appealingly messy striations, as spoonable as pudding. Vanilla angel-food sheet cake is soaked in espresso and a soft spike of rum and amaro. The finished trifle is showered in delicate curls of Askinosie chocolate, and each creamy bite bears an unmistakable vein of salt. 

Goldfield is a master of carnal writing. I devour it.

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