Everyone's company, in pandemic, is the drying rack and so: it is deeply satisfying that Bill Buford's journey to the pasta station is punctuated by _ceaseless_ swaths of time doing the dishes.

All his vividness merits a full swoon:

"The Grill Station is hell. You stand at it for five minutes and you think: So this is what Dante had in mind. [...] Close up, Mark Barrett, who had been told to teach me the job, reminded me of a person from another era. His hands had a nineteenth-century griminess. His fingernails were crescent moons of black cake. His forearms were hairless and ribbed with purple burns. His eyes were magnified—he blinked distortedly behind big-framed glasses—and his nose, still bandaged from being broken, was streaked with sooty streams of grease. He could have been a nearsighted chimney sweep. He smelled of sweat.”

Later, the Butcher actually quotes Dante:

"In the butcher shop, you need only say “Donna, me prega”—woman, ask me—the first words of Cavalcanti’s famous love poem, and several people were guaranteed to recite the rest in unison. Cavalcanti had been Dante’s best friend, and when Dario mentioned the two men the association called a passage to mind, and he began declaiming the Inferno, Canto 10 in fact, where Dante meets the father of the poet in Hell, the none-too-happy Cavalcante Cavalcanti."

But "Heat" came out in 2006, before #MeToo and any introspection about appetite. I have his next book, Dirt, queued up, ...and I hope it puts its fingernails and hairless forearms to work on the dangers of wine on a stoop with Batali, the harder seductions of sauce bearnaise. TBD!

I really enjoyed this book, especially the parts about actually working in Mario Batali's kitchen, and all of the action that goes on behind the scenes - the people and their personalities, the menus, etc. Less interesting to me were the histories of when an egg was first added to pasta dough or when polenta came on the scene. I think the most interesting takeaway for me is that small, thoughtful food is the best, though very hard to come by in our supermarket-dominated society.

This book is often gross and it hasn’t aged well (Batali down!). It’s also fabulously immersive, funny, erudite, and a welcome escape in a time of no travel, no restaurants, and no more nights at the bar with you brilliant boozehound of a friend. Eagerly awaiting his French book.

I don't think I would ever have picked this book out for myself, but it was the March selection for my book club, so I thought I would give it a shot. It has the trappings of a man's version of the first third of Eat, Pray, Love, but involves a lot more slicing and dicing.

To be honest, it was a bit of a slog to get through, but I persisted and gleaned a few small nuggets of wisdom. I also learned about a semi-famous fifteenth century chef who just might have some connection to my hubby's family. I doubt that I'm a better cook for having read this story, but I did learn more about Italian food. I also learned a couple of interesting recipes that I think my hubby will like (see below among the quotes.)

interesting quotes:

"Wretched excess is just barely enough." (p. 6)

"If someone has a great dish and returns to have it again, and you don't serve it to him in exactly the same way, then you're a dick." (p. 13)

"The practice seemed to illustrate a principle I was always hearing referred to as 'cooking with love.' A dish was a failure because it hadn't been cooked with love. A dish was a success because the love was so obvious. If you're cooking with love, every plate is a unique event - you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it: your food, made with your hands, arranged with your fingers, tasted with your tongue." (p. 32)

Recipe for short ribs (pp. 72-77)
using short ribs, or better yet the chuck flap, aka the shoulder fillet, the salmon cut or fish tail:
First, brown the meat in a smoking-hot pan drizzled with olive oil

"One. Remove the now brown and glistening ribs (using tongs, por favor) fromt he rondo [pan] and make a braising liquid, the stuff that's going to cover the ribs while they cook. In this method, the liquid is the essential ingredient, and it doesn't matter what it is as long as it's wet an plentiful (in an Irish pot roast, it's water), although the ideal liquid is both flavoring and flavorful and is made from one part wine (at Babbo, about three magnums' worth, which, as it happens, is not the Barolo of the dish's name but a perfectly acceptable, very cheap California Merlot) and one part meat broth (say, a chicken stock), plus loads of vegetables: some carrots, an onion, two stalks of celery, and five peeled cloves of garlic, all roughly chopped, which you throw back into the rondo, still hot, and stir. You add the wine, the broth, a can of tomatoes, and cook for a few minutes."

"Two. Put the now-browned ribs in a roasting pan, pour the braising liquid over them, add some rosemary and thyme, put a lid on top, stick it in the oven (350 degrees), and forget about it."

Three. (Three hours later, the ribs now cooked.) Turn the braising liquid into a sauce...first you remove the ribs and set them aside to cool; then you pour the liquid they were cooked in through a strainer into another pot...Next, you take this dense, aromatic, already highly extracted liquid and hammer it: you put it back on a burner and boil it to hell. Just torch it. Full blast. Lots of yellow-frothy melted fat will rise disgustingly to the surface. You skim this off and keep boiling the thing until it's reduced by more than half, when, lo and behold, it is no longer a braising liquid or a broth: it's a sauce."

Four. Once the ribs are cool, you discover that the bones have loosened themselves from the meat and come right out." Separate the ugly, sinewy bits from the meat and bones, pour the sauce on the yummy bits and serve.

"...we brown our meat simply because we like the taste." (p. 72)

"The sauce has been skimmed of fat and reduced to something that can be described as the food equivalent of most male movie stars: dark, rich, and thick." (p. 75)

"The satisfactions of makeing a good plate of food are surprisingly varied, and only one, and the least important of them, involves eating what you've made. In addition to the endless riffing about cooking-with-love, chefs also talk about the happiness of making food: not preparing or cooking food but making it. This is such an elementary thing that it is seldom articulated." (p. 142)

"How can you run a pasta museum and not be interested in teh first eggy pasta?" (p. 186) [How indeed? Obsess much?]

regarding the Learned Confederation of the Tortellino: "There is not one recipe; there is only the one you've been entrusted with." (p. 197)

"A butcher never sleeps. A butcher works in meat during the day and plays int eh flesh at night. A true butcher is a disciple of carnality." (p. 249)

"(...I'd accepted that Tuscans don't like green, and none of them had grown up with parents' urging them to eat their greens; their mothers had obviously said, 'Eat your browns.') Beef speaks to our souls. I don't know how else to explain it. It's in our DNA, this appetite - this need - for beef. It's what makes us Tuscan." (p. 267)

Recipe for Peposo (a tradtional slow-cooked beef shank) (p. 274-275)
couple of pounds of beef shank
pepper
garlic
salt
bottle of Chianti

Directions: put everything in a pot, stick it in the oven before you go to bed, take it out when you wake up.

"Start the oven hot and turn it down to 200 degrees. After 2 hours the meat is cooked. After four, it has the chewy mouth-feel of stew. Over the course of the next eight hours, the dish gets darker and the smaller bits break down into a thick sauce, until, finally, at a point between a solid and a liquid, it is peposo. It smells of wind and lean meat and pepper. You serve it with a rustic white bread and a glass of a simple red, preferrably the one you cooked with - once again, the three elements of Giovanni Manetti's Tuscan soul: the beef, the bread, the wine."

"Even in New York (once famous for its rudeness, now stuck in a condition of permanent impatience), I had never seen anything like it. There, a retailer, however jaded, still pretends to honor the shopkeeper's code that a customer is always right. Dario followed a much blunter, take-no-prisoners philosophy that actually the customer is a dick." (p. 278)

new words: ortolan, sabayon, sybaritic, toque, tautological

Eye opening view of the restaurant industry and what goes on in the kitchen. Also funny descriptions of all the craziness.Buford is a writer who decides he wants to see how a top kitchen functions and convinces Mario Batali to let him work in the kitchen. Amazingly he doesn't just do it for a week but several years. It becomes a passion for him. What an over the top character Mario Batali turns out to be.

Buford throws in items about the history of Italian cooking and he follows Batali and other chefs with trips to Italy to learn from chefs there. Fascinating book.

Another book I really liked was Passion on the Vine by Sergio Esposito. It wasn't as funny as Heat but the descriptions of the food and wine as he traveled through Italy looking for wine for his store was amazing.

I loved this book a whole lot - and warn that should you tackle it, please do so with a large amount of red wine and italian food readily available. Much like it's torture to watch Chocolat without chocolate, it would be rude not to eat pasta and drink red wine while this book's in your life.

The book's an amalgamation of many things I love - cooking, peeking behind the scenes at famous restaurants, drinking wine, contemplating where food does and should come from. Buford spent just over a year slowly learning skills in Mario Batali's kitchen, and his memoir of those months is interspersed by historical wanderings - when did eggs come to replace water in preparing pasta dough? Who wrote the first definitive Italian cookbook? Did Catherine de Medici really create French cuisine when she moved to France, betrothed to a Prince? There's even a little philosophizing on offer, a la Pollan and Bittman - it's not fast food or slow food that's the issue, Buford argues, it's big food and little food that matters:

Italians have a word, casalinga, homemade, although its primary sense is "made by hand." My theory is just a variant of casalinga. (Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant.)

I loved the behind-the-scenes details of what goes on in the kitchen of a good restaurant, and the historical diversions, and the quotes from centuries-old textbooks. Buford delivers all of it with a good sense of humor, especially when reflecting on his own mistakes, and the whole thing is fascinating and entertaining to a really remarkable degree. Yay book!

"Also, frankly, I didn't get the point of putting shellfish in pasta. You can't eat the shells, can you? And the eating was all so elaborate. You needed a bib, an extra plate, a finger bowl, an extra napkin, and an extra quantity of vigilance just to make sure that you didn't stick a shell in your mouth.... [then] I...discovered ...[it] wasn't about the pasta or the sauce...it was about both, the result...evocative of a childhood trip to the sea."

This is an odd book, and I read it because it's been on my "TBR" shelf for ten years. I don't know much about Buford and I did a hybrid of reading the ebook and listening to the author narrate the audiobook. (And this book is tough to follow in audiobook form because of all the parenthetical remarks and quotations, though Buford does a good job of speaking in both English and Italian accents.)

I'm not a cook. And while I enjoy cooking competition shows, I don't even know Mario Batali that well (other than what I looked up on Wikipedia, and it's not great.) I do know Joe Bastianich from Master Chef but I don't love him either. I know nothing about Marco Pierre White and don't really care to know more (especially when he throws a cigarette butt away and it lands on the lap of his child.) Honestly, the New York stuff wasn't my favorite, although I definitely felt like I was in the kitchen with Buford, sweating and dicing and working till 2am. (This book apparently is not written to convince you to work in a kitchen.)

I did appreciate the Italy part, where Buford goes to learn the art of pasta-making, history of the egg in pasta (which he was really fired up about) and butchering pigs and cows.

This felt really long but I think because I had a hard time figuring out what it was supposed to be. It was partial memoir (although we know nothing about Buford other than he's curious... at one point he mentions leaving New York because of "personal demons" but doesn't elaborate), partial history, partial how-to. Certain people may really like it, and I did learn stuff. I just had a difficult time picking it up to keep reading.

Exceedingly digressive in tone, this book starts as a flattery of Batali, but about one-third of the way in shifts to subtle self-congratulation as the author becomes a more experienced cook. It was enjoyable to learn about traditional Italian culinary techniques and attitudes, but I am disappointed to read a book on the art of cooking which imparts virtually no practical information to the reader.

More reviews can be found on my book blog.
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I ignored this very popular book for years because I wasn’t that interested in restaurant culture. I love food and cooking, but the day-to-day schedule of a line cook, preparing the same thing every day, wasn’t something I found exciting.

My assumption was that this would be the account of Bill Buford spending a month or two in a kitchen, waxing poetic about the strong work ethic and the screaming chefs, but it’s much more than that. He spent nearly four years working on and off in Mario Batali’s New York restaurant, Babbo, working with Batali’s former boss in London, and visiting Italy to apprentice as a butcher. That’s a level of dedication I didn’t expect coming into this.

I also didn’t know that this was partly a high-level biography of Mario Batali’s cooking life, from arriving in Italy for the first time as a youth to his rise to fame as a celebrity chef. He’s a chef that other chefs consider legit, but I’m somewhat unfamiliar with him and really had no interest to learn more. Buford’s descriptions also made him out as a bit of an asshole, especially at the beginning, which killed my enthusiasm somewhat.

But I quickly got over that, because this is a fantastic read. Buford’s an engaging writer who can easily transport the reader directly into the middle of a hectic kitchen or in front of a plate of spectacular food. I mentioned I wasn’t interesting in the restaurant side of things, but he really won me over. In spending so much time in Batali’s kitchen, he was able to move from station to station and really give the reader a sense of how a professional kitchen works. Each station has its own challenges and lessons, and I really enjoyed being able to see it from a newbie’s perspective. Restaurant kitchens are usually written about by veterans as they look back, but here we see it through fresh eyes.

I hate how romanticized the stereotypical screaming Gordon Ramsey style chef has become, which in most cases is really just macho posturing in an attempt to cover the fact that the chef has no business leading other people, and Buford does a decent job of not falling into that. In one chapter he has a sous-chef slapping food out of his hand over and over in an attempt to make a point that, honestly, doesn’t exist. It’s ridiculous and wasteful, and Buford doesn’t try too hard to turn it into a life lesson. He just presents it as it happened, which I appreciated.

A few reviews that I came across complained that the chapter-long digressions into food facts were too dull, but they were some of my favourites. I enjoyed the chapter on the history of pasta and the chapter researching when cooks started added eggs to their pasta dough. He presented them in a way that made you feel like you were following along with his research, looking over the shoulder of a foodie Indiana Jones as he digs through his father’s journal. Those chapters, and the chapters detailing his apprenticeship in Italy, were my favourites in the book.

I wasn’t completely on board with the premise of this, but Buford really won me over. His writing draws you in, and I loved the near obsession he has in his research. I’m hoping he writes another food-related book at some point.

This is one of the best food-related narratives I've read. The topic, Buford's quest to learn to cook by working in Babbo's kitchen in New York, would probably have been interesting enough to garner four stars. It's a five star book because Buford combines beautiful prose with the type of detailed descriptions and intense self-reflexivity that is at the heart of all great memoirs. Mario Batali is a character whose antics, alone, could fill the pages of several books. But Buford does not allow him to carry away the book. The focus is food, and all of the intricacies of learning how to prepare it. Thus by the end of Heat, Buford has not only given an intense behind the scenes account of working in the kitchen of a high-end New York restaurant, but he's pursued his own quest to learn to cook all the way to Tuscany, where he apprenticed with a pasta maker and a butcher. Throughout these travels, Buford's eye for detail brings to life the people and places he sees, rendering them vivid and real. I'm anxiously awaiting his next book (supposedly on French cuisine), but in the meantime may even seek out Among the Thugs, his in-depth look at soccer hooligans. This, more than any other description I've offered, should attest to the quality of Buford's prose. *I* want to read a book about sports because he's written it.

When I first started this book, I asked my friend Jen what she thought of it. Not much, apparently; she didn't find the author "compelling". It was just boring, even for an amateur cook like me. He describes things (like when egg was first introduced as an ingredient in pasta) that he says most people would not be interested in, and then goes on and on ad nauseum about them. If you know they are not interesting to people, then why go into detail about them? It is odd that he was an editor for The New Yorker. He seemed to use the same words over and over. I thought "evanescent" must be his new favorite word since he used it to describe everyone and everything. It also occurred to me that he wasn't a very likable person, either. It was clear that he enjoyed starting trouble. He didn't seem to have any loyalty to the chefs who were teaching him. He told Dario's secrets about where he obtained his meat to Dario's arch enemy, for example. The book is full of gossip about his teachers, including Mario Batali, and he also makes sure to attribute it to someone else ... (I'm just sayin'...). He was pretty impressed with himself and the obscure facts he could find out about gastronomy. I agree with him that most people don't want to know about how their hamburger came to be; I certainly don't. And maybe we should take some responsibility for what we eat. However, his description of butchering and detailed passages about the uses of what most people would consider the inedible parts of an animal were enough to turn me away from steak forever and possibly turn me into a vegetarian! At the end of the book, it sounds as if Batali and he are still friends but I wonder if that changed once Batali read it. Certainly, it is no news that Batali is a wild man and a hard partier; however, I felt the author's representation of him was small and mean-spirited, especially considering that a kitchen on the level of Babbo would, as he himself admitted, never take on a home chef without formal kitchen education or experience. The author is an ingrate, and I found him (and subsequently his book) distasteful. He moves his wife all over the world with disregard for her job(she's an editor-in-chief of a major magazine in New York, I believe) on his whim. He ends the book with the fact that Mario offered him a restaurant (and of course getting in that now he knew stuff Mario didn't know) but that he was now going to go to France! Great advertisement for a sequel, wouldn't you say?

A terrific reading of a hugely entertaining book. The very long title pretty much summarizes the gist: Mr. Buford, a writer and editor, finagles a job working in Chef Mario Batali's NYC restaurant, Babbo, starting as lowly, brow-beaten kitchen prep, and proceeds, without any real ambition, to work his way up, somewhat, in the kitchen hierarchy. This stretch of the book will be familiar to anyone who has read Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential," both in terms of restaurant and cooking detail plus, to an extent, similarity of writing style (both Mr. Buford and Mr. Bourdain are very good writers). The difference from "Kitchen Confidential" lies in Mr. Buford's self-professed (and I think genuine) lack of ambition in pursuing any sort of restaurant career - basically he's there for the education and, apparently, for the writing material.

The book then morphs into descriptions of two stints the author makes in Italy, one to learn how to make pasta and the other how to butcher (and cook) meat. These aren't just stints in Italy, they are stints in (emphasis, please) Tuscany - both the pasta maker and the butcher with whom Mr. Buford works and learns show immense pride in their particular region, and the bits about Tuscans and their style of food (lots of brown, not much by way of vegetables) are very interesting.

Mr. Buford has a great eye for detail and terrific skill in turning a phrase - he's very funny and the reader for this audio edition (sorry, don't have his name in front of me) is excellent.