A must-read for foodies and Slow Foodies.

In one passage of the book, Bill Buford becomes preoccupied with researching when, in the long history of food on the Italian peninsula, cooks started putting eggs into their pasta dough. He decides to go on a quest to Italy and meets with the cook at La Volta, a small restaurant in the town of Porretta Terme. Mario Batali lived and worked here during an internship before going to New York and opening Babbo. He considers the cook, Betta, and all the others associated with La Volta, extended family. And so Buford sets out to meet her and find out about pasta and what inspired Batali.

Buford writes(page 198 of the hardcover):

Betta's tortellini are now in my head and in my hands. I follow her formula for the dough--an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn't look wet enough. I've learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I let it dry if I'm making tagliatelle; I keep it damp if I'm making tortellini. I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of the pasta, each movement like the last one. My mind empties. I think only of the task. Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I'm back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of association, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can't hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.

This book starts out starting as a bibliography of Mario Batali, which probably would have been interesting enough and sufficient for me, but then it goes in so many interesting directions, particularly towards the question that I wonder about all the time: How was Italian food developed? He focuses this search on one specific question: When was egg added to pasta dough? and goes through several apprenticeships around Italy that fill in many answers.

I found the book beautifully written.

I need to confess that one of the other recent food books I read was "How Italian Food Conquered the World" by John Mariani, which was exactly the book you'd expect the food and wine critic for Esquire to write, a litany of restaurant reviews. Because that book was so poor, I may have heightened appreciation for Heat.

I also think that Mr. Buford has a bit of the Hemingway wannabe to him, so I can understand some of the criticism I've read about him. I wasn't worried too much about his bravado, I just found his story exceptionally well told about a topic which I care about deeply.

"Bill Buford likes to surround himself with histrionic people, whose antics frequently cross the line into violence. First, it was the soccer hooligans. Now it's three-star NY chef Mario Batali and Italian butcher Dario Cecchini. You can imagine Buford and Batali, into their fifth bottle of wine in a dim New York hot spot at three in the morning, Buford regaling the imbecilic escapades of the Man United fans in the eighties, and Batali savoring (and interrupting) every detail. Not content with his job as New Yorker fiction editor, Buford abandons his day job to be a kitchen slave in Babbo and later an apprentice to a pasta maker and a butcher in Italy. An excellent read for foodies. Selected quotes:

Chicken feet are a vivid sight--like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly--and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many people, clawing at the churning water; trying to climb out, the bubbling pot a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the hottest place.

The burden was in the fact that the polenta was never made first thing. It was always the seventh or eighth thing. So if you got busy and forgot--if suddenly, at four-thirty, you found yourself saying, ""Oh shit, the polenta!""--you were in trouble. You can't crush three hours of slow cooking into sixty minutes. For emergencies, a box of the instant was hidden on the top shelf of the walk-in, but to use it was considered a failure of character. It also rendered Frankie apoplectic, who took these lapses as personal slights. ""You're doing this to humiliate me,"" he'd say to whoever he'd just spotted, tiptoeing like a shoplifter, clandestinely slinking off with a box of the instant an hour before the service started. ""You're doing this to make me look bad. You're doing this because you know we will fucking lose our fucking three stars if we start serving fucking instant, and if we lose our fucking three stars I lose my fucking job.""

One busy Saturday, Dario was serving a woman about to purchase her first bistecca who then asked him if the meat was good. ""Ebuona?"" Dario said, his voice rising theatrically with exaggerated indignation. ""Non lo so. Proviano"" (I don't know--let's find out.) So he took a bite--the woman's raw purchase--chewed it melodramatically, swallowed, said, ""Yes, it's good,"" wrapped it up, and gave the woman her change. The woman, aghast, took her package and fled. The consequence was that several people asked Dario if he would take a bite out of their steaks as well-as though his teeth marks were an autograph. ""Please,"" one man said, ""it's for my wife.""

"""

So far, so good... makes working in a glamorous restaurant not so glamorous... Ok, I've finally finished the book and the beginning is definitely better than the middle and the end. Sort of confirmed by suspicion that despite my gastronomic ambitions, I'm not cut out for a professional kitchen. However, the book makes that point early for me with the author's torturous experience at Babbo. But he just keeps on torturing himself with these forced apprenticeships with various Italian artisans. After a while, the information was not that interesting anymore and I found myself watching Top Chef on Bravo instead...

This book was recommended to me by a friend who knows me to be a bit of a foodie and thought I would enjoy it. For the most part I did enjoy it a lot, the author has a whit about him that I rather enjoyed. That being said I found myself growing a bit bored about half way through as the funny stories of restaurant life gave way to long meandering descriptions of pasta and pigs, interesting for a page or two, not ten. A good read that perhaps could have used a bit more editing.

Good, but not great.

A book about food and cooking intertwined with the author’s reflections on his personal culinary journey. In the end, both elements are solid but not spectacular — something is lost at the intersection of the two. Yet another book that speaks to the toxic masculinity that seems to characterize high-end restaurant kitchens and chefs that get away with being not great people because they make good food.

Some interesting reflections on food culture at the end, but perhaps with a side of elitism. If I enjoy my food (regardless of whether it’s a Big Mac or something farm to table in the “traditional” style), who are you to judge?

This book gives a fun peak inside the world of a 3-star New York kitchen. Buford is at his best when describing the Babbo kitchen where he initially starts his education. His travels to Italy give you a sense of the eccentric characters that eventually teach him to make pasta and carve meat. However, his almost irrelevant search for the exact moment an egg was introduced to the recipe for pasta becomes long-winded. He delves into the history of Italian recipes but his references sometimes seem like an afterthought. But all of these negatives are interjected with stories of Mario and his all-night partying which always liven up the story!

If you like cooking, if you like eating, if you like great writing, you'll love this book.

I just can't get into this. I want to, seriously, I do, but I just can't. I had no idea it was this heavily focused on Mario Batali. I've never been a huge fan of his. In addition, the author, unlike Michael Ruhlman, doesn't really convey a passion to me of why he wants to cook. He also (to be fair, so far) hasn't really given us any explanation as to why he went from writer to cook. So I'm putting it down and starting something new.

This delivers exactly what the subtitle says - and more, so much more. Buford, a journalist on the staff of The New Yorker, persuades Batali to let him work for free in his professional kitchen (Babbo) so Buford can both improve his home cooking skills to a more professional level, and to experience a real restaurant kitchen as a member of the staff. What happens to Buford, besided getting the story he wanted about Batali himself (I suspected there was a story behind the whole thing in the first place -- I mean, journalist?) is he not only becomes a true member of the kitchen crew for about a year, but he also becomes passionate about learning everything about traditional Tuscan Italian cooking to the point of spending extensive time in Tuscany working for free in various kitchens and in a butcher shop in the hills near Bologna. Along the way, a lot of really interesting Italian food history is shared, techniques, info about differen restaurants here and in Italy, and we meet a lot of extraordinary cooks and chefs, not alway in a good way.

We also realize that the author is a tad obsessive -- which he eventually admits. I mean, he spends so much time trying to determine just when in history the egg was added to pasta dough taking the place of water. Not even the director of the Pasta Museum (in Rome I think) has any idea or seems to care. It's rather amusing, actually. One rather interesting thread through the book is the superiority and even resentment the Italian cooks express towards French cooking, claiming that Classical French Cooking only came into being because when Catarina di Medici went to France to become Queen Catherine in the mid-1500s, she took all Renaissance Italy's cooking secrets and ingredients with her. It also leads to a great deal of amusement for Buford because he'll see a sauce for example that Batali insists is Italian but it's exactly like a classic French sauce. Plus, it becomes Bufords new obsession - tracing the roots of Classical French Cuisine back to Italy - and the underlying theme of his recently published memoir Dirt: Adventures, with Family, in the Kitchens of Lyon, Looking for the Origins of French Cooking.

If you love books about food, cooking, and the world of restaurants, this book is for you. Batali features large, especially in the first third or so and in fact a good portion of that section serves as a biography of Batali himself. I will admit that I was initially a tad angry at Buford for not pointing out and criticizing Batali and his harassment of women and minorities in his restaurants. I still think he was ignoring an elephant in the room but realize also that being published in 2006, it was a decade before the sexual harassment claims and suits that started against Batali in 2017 and led to his leaving the restaurant and cooking professionally world. The treatment of women and minorities in NY kitchens and restaurants was already notorious and under scrutiny then (as I know from having women and minroities working in NYC kitchens as clients). By not calling it what it was, Buford effectively condoned it for another decade.

But that's looking at a 2006 book from 2023. Meanwhile, I'm not sure what my favorite scene in the book is, either the schlepping a whole 225 lb. pig on his scooter to his Manhattan apartment building and getting it into the tiny elevator to his apartment or the delivery of the chianine bull to his new harem in the hills of Northern Tuscany, You'll find those in the extended section where Buford decides he needs to learn Tuscan butchery from the celebrity butcher Dario Cecchini.

I had heard about this book when it first came out but then it became lost to me in the complications of life. My curiosity was piqued seeing the title again, and I promptly ordered. Mr. Buford's expose of working in a restaurant kitchen under the aegis of the famous chef, Mario Battali, was revelatory. I thought of my own long-ago experiences of working in a hotel kitchen but those couldn't be compared in any way with the magnitude of Mr. Buford's (or any other famous restaurant cook) daily work-til-you-drop existence on the highest level. Only once, when I was asked to participate in a "guest chef" night at a California restaurant, and began my work early in the day, continuing until 1:30 a.m., finally home circa 3 a.m., I finally turned to my partner and angrily said, "Don't ever ask me to do this again". (He had often said that he wanted to open a restaurant) This was my only comparable experience of being under such unrelenting pressure with dinner in two shifts, and 10:30 at night, the line was still forming out the door and down the block.
His writing was interesting, piquant. Sometimes, I imagined the scene he was describing and burst out laughing. At other passages, I was horrified, felt so sorry for him from terrible accidents while working, fully knowing how the American job ethic is--no sickness, keep on working--even when you've just cut off a finger or two. I kept imagining that very soon he would tell Mr. Battali that he'd found another job, or would open his own restaurant. Not so. His wish was to work in Italy. He was suddenly in a country hill town in Tuscany in the shop of a Dante- rhapsodizing butcher and in the background, his own "Maestro". It was here, Mr. Buford was profoundly changed not just because he was working in a language he didn't have a clear cognizance of. He was thinking of the history of the region as well as the actuality of what an animal's importance is to human beings, in the sense that so many of us don't. We go to a super market and get a shrink-wrapped chicken or a pork roast but most of us don't dwell further. Back in New York, he then buys a pig to slaughter in his apartment kitchen. He picks it up and the deed had already been done--the creature was laying under a plastic wrap, but Mr. Buford had to get him home. He carried the 225-pounder into the elevator where the "product" dripped blood on a well-dressed banker neighbor's shoes, who looked at this with some chagrin. You have to read the rest, dear reader. This is heartfelt, poignant, intelligent. I was so sorry when it over. Bravo Mr. Buford!

The real problem I have with this book is that Bill Bufford is Mario Batali's bitch. Whenever he is in the presence of Batali, he seems unable to objectively represent Batali as anything other than a kitchen-jock superstar chef. That gets rather tiresome. Sure he goes on to Italy and cooks and learns, but it is never far away from where Batali told him to go or what Batali told him to do. Why didn't Mario Batali just write the damned book himself? Because that would have been such an exercise in masturbation that it would have to be sold in the adult section. I hope that Mario Batali's ego has been suffiently stroked that he can finally feel secure that no one think's he's a "fag" for doing "faggoty" cooking as he worries early on in the book.

Dear Mario,
A literary handjob is still a handjob.
sincerely,
Jerry