A food book + a travel book? You know I liked this one.

Bill Buford convinced famous and accomplished chefs in New York that he should work for them (despite not having the traditional training or experience). And then Buford convinced some more famous and accomplished chefs in Italy that he should work for them. And then he wrote about it.

He has moxy and is a good writer. What's not to like?

This book made me laugh so hard. Bill Buford has an incredible way of getting his story across so that you feel like you're in the room with him and Mario Batali and the crazy Italian butcher. More than that, it makes you want to be in the kitchen. At least, it makes me want to be in a kitchen but I love cooking and food so there you are. If you like food, this book is for you. You don't have to be a food snob or anything, just seriously like food. And like reading, of course.

I have wanted to read this book for a long time. Now that I finished it, I am ready to move to Italy and be a cooking apprentice. One of the striking things from the book is the role Mario Batali plays, and how in the light is the MeToo accusations against him, some of the anecdotes in the book seem horrific. It often mentions how he gratuitously sexualized women in public settings for his own amusement. That part of the book has aged poorly, though it seemed as if the author was trying to tell the world about it in the first place.

Loving this so far. It's nearly a guilty pleasure, an wonderfully pleasurable and easy read, an outsider's insider take on working with real chefs and great talents. Highest compliments I can pay it: 1. It makes me hungry. 2. It makes me want to learn more about cooking. 3. It makes me want to go to Italy now.

La lecture de ce livre donne non seulement l'eau à la bouche, mais surtout l'envie de cuisiner et d'innover en cuisine. C'est l'histoire d'un apprentissage, celui de la cuisine italienne, racontée du point de vue de l'apprenti amateur dont le seul vœu est de sortir de son état d'ignorant. Tout y passe donc : les anecdotes de cuisine, la relation aux maîtres tous plus excentriques les uns que les autres (est-ce là la marque du génie ?), le savoir-faire patient des artisans, la tradition (perdue ?), les querelles de clochers (entre cuisine italienne et cuisine française), le respect des produits (l’œuf des pâtes fraiches, par exemple), etc.

Book Review

Heat by Bill Buford
Reviewed by Tom Carrico

Bill Buford is a former editor of the “The New Yorker” magazine, founding editor of “Granta” magazine and publisher of Granta Books. His hobby was cooking. He cooked for friends and business associates and on one occasion for the renowned chef Mario Batali. That occasion prompted Mr. Buford to quit his job at “The New Yorker” and sign on as an unpaid intern at Batali’s three star Italian restaurant Babbo in New York City. This book is part memoir of that experience, part travelogue, part history of Italian cooking and part observatory character studies of the eccentric personalities the author encountered. Add to this mixture a large aliquot of humor and you have the recipe for a thoroughly enjoyable book.

The memoir portion of the book details his rise from “kitchen slave” to line cook (which included a stint at the grill station) and finally to pasta maker. The author’s misadventures, including dicing the carrots too small, multiple injuries (including splatter burns and minor lacerations) and wasting food are all humorously documented. The amazing aspect of all of this to me was how much this experience (although only lasting about a year) was reminiscent of my surgical residency. The graded responsibility, the general fault-finding and learning from mistakes all seemed remarkably similar to that experience. Initially, his superiors criticize every move and use every mistake as a “teaching opportunity” (usually involving screaming). As he moves up the responsibility ladder, Mr. Buford relates his frustration when the kitchen manager (who in my mind represented the Surgical Chief Resident) demanding that certain orders be replated immediately for no apparent reason.

The even more fascinating portions of the book come about when Chef Batali talks to the author (“talking” here includes earsplitting fits of anger) and informs him that the only way to truly understand the art of cooking Italian food was to go to Italy and learn it first hand. This is, in fact, the way Batali learned. The author does indeed make many trips to Italy. First he learns the fine art of pasta making from women who run a small restaurant and were taught their skills by their mother and their aunts, who in turn were taught by their mothers and aunts. The reader learns the difference between pastasciutta and pasta fresca, when the egg was first introduced into the ingredients (it turns out nobody, including the curators of the Pasta Museum in Italy, are exactly sure, although sometime in the 13th century is a good guess), and why machine made pasta is unacceptable. On a return trip to Panzano (near Tuscany), Mr. Buford learns the art of the butcher from Dario Cecchini, who comes from a long line of master butchers. Dario has the interesting habit of intermittently screaming long excerpts from The Divine Comedy alternating with singing excerpts from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” while he works. These “performances” are fueled by generous amounts of alcohol. The meticulous care of knives, the various cuts of meat from pigs and cows and the appreciation for the preparation of meats as an art form are detailed.
The cast of characters which Mr. Buford meets while working at Babbo (including the maestro Batali) and traveling and living in Italy is colorful and very amusingly described by the author and is one of the strengths of Heat. This cast includes the characters already described above as well as the other restaurant workers who jealously guard their secrets of success, the Italians who courageously defend their ancient cooking arts in a modern world as well as the menagerie which makes up the restaurant world in New York City (including patrons, competing chefs and newspaper food critics).

I don’t know if this was the best book to read while trying to adopt a “heart-healthy” diet and mode of living, but I know that even under those circumstances this was a thoroughly enjoyable, entertaining, humorous and even informative book. Heat by Bill Buford is available in trade paperback from Vintage Books.

Excellent book showing what it takes to become a cook. Loved his dedication to get skill from different place (like his multiple trips to the butcher shop in Italy), his humor (getting 225 lbs pig to Manhattan apartment in elevator :-)). I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to understand how much work the good cook put in (long shifts, endless trying to perfect cooking techniques) and what is food about (like his search of who first put eggs into pasta). I loved his idea of small food vs. big food.

3.5/5

Punchy prose but a bit repetitive towards the middle. I like Buford and his dedication.

If Buford’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the founding editor of Granta magazine and publisher at Granta Books, but by the time he wrote this he was a staff writer for the New Yorker. Mario Batali is this book’s presiding imp. In 2002–3, Buford was an unpaid intern in the kitchen of Batali’s famous New York City restaurant, Babbo, which serves fancy versions of authentic Italian dishes. It took 18 months for him to get so much as a thank-you. Buford’s strategy was “be invisible, be useful, and eventually you’ll be given a chance to do more.”

In between behind-the-scenes looks at frantic or dull sessions of food prep (“after you’ve made a couple thousand or so of these little ears [orecchiette pasta], your mind wanders. You think about anything, everything, whatever, nothing”), Buford traces Batali’s culinary pedigree through Italy and London, where Batali learned from the first modern celebrity chef, Marco Pierre White, and gives pen portraits of the rest of the kitchen staff. At first only trusted with chopping herbs, the author develops his skills enough that he’s allowed to work the pasta and grill stations, and to make polenta for 200 for a benefit dinner in Nashville.

Later, Buford spends stretches of several months in Italy as an apprentice to a pasta-maker and a Tuscan butcher. His obsession with Italian cuisine is such that he has to know precisely when egg started to replace water in pasta dough in historical cookbooks, and is distressed when the workers at the pasta museum in Rome can’t give him a definitive answer. All the same, the author never takes himself too seriously: he knows it’s ridiculous for a clumsy, unfit man in his mid-forties to be entertaining dreams of working in a restaurant for real, and he gives self-deprecating accounts of his mishaps in the various kitchens he toils in:

to stir the polenta, I was beginning to feel I had to be in the polenta. Would I finish cooking it before I was enveloped by it and became the darkly sauced meaty thing it was served with?

Compared to Kitchen Confidential, I found this less brash and more polished. You still get the sense of macho posturing from a lot of the figures profiled, but of course this author is not going to be in a position to interrogate food culture’s overweening masculinity. However, he does take a stand in support of small-scale food production:

Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant. Just about every preparation I learned in Italy was handmade and involved learning how to use my own hands differently. … Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go.

This is exactly what I want from food writing: interesting nuggets of trivia and insight, a quick pace, humor, and mouthwatering descriptions. If the restaurant world lures you at all, you must read this one. I was delighted to learn that this year Buford released a sequel of sorts, this one about French cuisine: Dirt. It’s on my wish list.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

If you love food... or dream of being a master chef... read this book! I could not put it down. I don't read many books twice - pretty much never - but this is going on a shelf to be read again.

I had mixed feelings on this one. It started out swimmingly--I was howling with laughter as the author detailed the highs (including the extracurricular highs) and the lows of the Babbo employment experience. I was shocked (in a highly amused way) by the author's description of Batali. Surely, the soft-spoken, well-mannered guy I cheer for on Iron Chef America could not be telling his servers to "pistol-whip" unruly customers with their unmentionables behind Babbo's closed doors! (If true, as a former bartender, this makes me like him even more, if we are being honest.)

Then, it got so sloooowww in the middle that I finally just skipped over several chapters near the end to see how it ended.

I think the book would have been easier to read if it had been divided into parts that detail the different phases (Batali's professional education, the author's time at Babbo and the author's time in Italy). As it is written, I found it disjointed and distracting.

I did really enjoy learning about Italy's food traditions and about different food preparations. It made me very hungry :).

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Buford's tale was a workhorse - at once a biography (of Mario Batali and various other influences in Buford's Life), an autobiography, a travelogue, and an exposé on the restaurant business in Manhattan and in Italy. Buford floats from one eclectic journey and challenge to the next, yet the book's narrative makes perfect sense.

This book made me so hungry - but hungry in a very soulful way. It makes you long for polenta or homemade pasta and ragú not because your stomach is empty, but because of some deeper emotional necessity. It really made me appreciate the beauty of my Italian culinary heritage.

My one critique of Buford's book is that I think he sort of alienates the reader from the process of cooking. One implication of the book is, as I read it, that you need years of training and the ability to travel the world to make the food that he describes. Few of us have the time or means to make Buford's journey. I couldn't help but feel a bit left out.