Adam Gopnik writes like the longstanding contributor to the New Yorker that he is. Which is to say, he has a voice that is by turns conversational and dandyish, regular Joe and Ivy League, fancy about everyday pleasures (sport, food) and defiantly unawed about those subjects that are supposed to matter more (art, philosophy). Lots of people write, have written, for the New Yorker, and clearly they don't all sound the same  Updike is not Thurber, Dorothy Parker is not Janet Malcolm  but you can't deny a family resemblance. Perhaps it's a confidence thing, a feeling that it is the voice, rather than the subject, that is the point: whether it's Gopnik on Paris, Gopnik on Abraham Lincoln or, as in this new book, Gopnik on food, it is the Gopnik bit that gives what restaurant critics like to call "the sizzle".

So these are personal essays in the fullest sense of the word, sieving the big subjects of the book's subtitle  family, France, food  through one man's well-furnished mind. They are personal in the more obvious sense, too, of relying on Gopnik's willingness to throw open the doors of his kitchen and allow us to sit down at the family table. Much of the material is drawn from a five-year period when he was living with his wife and two young children in Paris, and cooking for them all.

We hear about the butterscotch he made in honour of his daughter's dog (another Butterscotch), about the wrinkled button noses that greet his rubbing of roast chicken with duck fat, about the three different ways he does rice pudding. There is sentiment here, then, but it is sentiment as it would have been understood in the 18th century, as a flash of strong feeling from which complex moral and intellectual enquiry naturally flows. Gopnik's heroes are Rousseau, Voltaire and Adam Smith and, while you may not have pegged these grands philosophes as handy in the kitchen, Gopnik feels that it is to their large, clear minds we must turn if we want to understand what really goes on when we raise a fork to our lips.

The Table Comes First includes no recipes as such, but what it does have is a lot of dirty cutlery, crumpled napkins and happy, replete Gopniks. It also has letters, like those epistolary narratives so beloved of the late enlightenment. The only difference here is that the person Gopnik is writing to can't write back. She is Elizabeth Pennell, a cookery writer whose 1896 collection The Diary of a Greedy Woman Gopnik likes for its unabashed celebration of appetite. He writes Pennell imaginary emails outlining his failure to make omelettes and the secret to his excellent lime pesto, and they get on swimmingly (probably because she can't write back) until Gopnik discovers something quite horrid. "Lizzie" was an antisemite, particularly nasty about the Russian Jews who moved into the very blocks in Philadelphia where Gopnik's own immigrant grandparents put down roots.

One of Gopnik's chief through-lines in this collection of essays is an enquiry into why high-end restaurant culture has divided so sharply in recent years. On the one hand we have molecular gastronomy, associated in this country with Heston Blumenthal but actually the brainchild of the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià. This is the white lab coat approach to taste manipulation where boundaries of disgust get tested with such perverse mash-ups as parmesan ice-cream and goat-brain tartare with eel. Yet at the same time we have the fetishisation of slow food, a way of cooking that insists on using only the most local and seasonal of ingredients and simmering them in the kind of thick-bottomed pot your imaginary peasant granny might have used.

I'd automatically have put Gopnik in the second camp, a slow food type who goes all giddy at the sight of a potager. But in fact it emerges that he finds all that obsession with soil and roots and purity slightly suspect, in a Lizzie Pennell-ish kind of way. And bogus too. For the reality is that French cookery, like everyone else's, has always been a mixed bag, picking its ingredients from whoever turned up with some coloured beans in their travelling pack.

Gopnik, in fact, turns out to be more at home with the pointy heads. But perhaps what's really important is that he doesn't think that either of these ways of eating  Luddite or test tube  has right on its side, or even actually matters very much. They are both fads, conjured up as much by febrile cultural chatter as by the need to find the right, best, proper way to pack 2,000 calories of protein, starch and fat into the human body every day. And Gopnik knows where the fault lies: with people like him. "Pretending there are patterns when there are really only passing moments is about the only thing writers are good for," he says.

So words come first for Gopnik, before taste, certainly, and sometimes, one might suggest, before substance. His writing here is a high-glazed wonder, as if just the right amount of calf's foot jelly had been dropped into the final mix to make each colour sing out that little bit more strongly. But whether there is an argument to hang on to is not so clear. This is not, for all the cultural name-dropping (apparently Gopnik's mum once made a soufflé for Derrida) a work of philosophical enquiry. It is actually an extended piece of journalism in that fine New Yorker tradition, and all the more pleasurable for it.

Kathryn Hughes's biography of Isabella Beeton is published by Harper Perennial.