Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

Like a master chef's kitchen, Bill Buford's journal of his food journey is rich and sensual with flavor and aromas.An established magazine editor and successful author Bill Buford has always been an amateur cook, but in his late forties he decides that living in an ephemeral and materialistic world of slight success, fashion, and fame is not enough for him. He wants to understand the soul of things, and ultimately that means understanding where the food he eats comes from and how it is best prepared, and while at first that means writing a magazine article on Mario Batali, the search ultimately takes him to Italy where he learns to make fresh pasta, butcher pigs and cows, and while falling in love with tradition and heritage also come to see poignantly how they can change and disappear as well.The book swings back and forth between two places. First there's Buford's hometown of New York City, where Mario Batali runs the finest Italian restaurant in America and where Bill Buford has situated himself as a kitchen slave. Then there are the hills of northern Italy where Batali learned the power and allure of true and traditional Italian cooking, and where Buford traveled many times in the search for the essence of food, and the origin of things.Batali's Michelin three-star kitchen is a source of endless conflict, and Buford describes it brilliantly as though the kitchen staff were a ragtag motley platoon of misfits and maniacs caught at war. The hills of Italy, on the other hand, are an endless source of fascination and wonder for Buford, and it is in these sections -- powered by Buford's love -- that are slow and at times ponderous to read.Like a brilliantly prepared Italian dish, "Heat" is full of subtle and sublime flavor, created by the author's wonderful and precise use of detail and food nouns, and while this like good food can activate all our senses and stimulate intoxicating memories it can also be at times too rich and thus at times a bit revolting. (Was an entire chapter on polenta really necessary?)And this book can only be truly appreciated by the true gourmand, as it is so densely packed with culinary terminology and thinking.While Buford's preparation and execution can be a bit much, I did come away learning a lot from this book, lessons that will stay with me for the rest of my life, as I deepen my culinary practice: How simplicity can take a lifetime to master, how a food tastes of its ingredients (case in point is how pasta is defined by the quality of its egg) and of the devotion of its practitioners (it seems that only petite Italian women with very small hands with nothing to do all day but make tortellini can make true tortellini), how meat is defined not by the breed of the animal but by the breeding of the animal (feed a cow real grass, and let it grow strong and big by letting it till the fields and roam the pastures, and you'll have excellent beef), and how food can unite families and define cultures like nothing else (Italians believe they invented food).And so unfortunately with the advent of modernization, technology, and globalization, food culture is slowly being lost to us. Here is an Italian master's poetic and poignant description of what we have lost:"In the seventies, the chianine were good. They tasted of the hillsides and clean air. They ate grass and had acres to roam in, and, because they were work animals, they were exercised constantly. The meat was firm and pure. It might take two weeks before it softened up. Today, the chianine do not have hillsides to roam in, because you use a tractor to work vines, not an animal. And instead of grass, they eat cereals, grains, and protein pellets: mush. They eat mush. They taste of mush. And after the animal is slaughtered, the meat behaves like mush: it disintegrates in days. A chianina is a thing to flee from!"

The book is Buford's memoir of what started out as his attempt to learn what it was like to work in and run a restaurant and to become a better cook. In the end, it turned into an obsession to truly understand Italian cooking and to gain the kind of insight into food and its preparation that was handed down for millenia by people who lived close to the land and to the source of their food.Many people will pick up the book because of its association with Mario Batali, the famed Italian chef of the "Food Network," and while he plays a prominent role, it is not a book about him. Batali is one of a handful of figures--all larger than life--who lead Buford on his journey of discovery.Here's a warning for you: If you want to keep alive the myth of the jovial but tame TV chef, don't pick up this book because in it Batali is revealed as a slightly manic, foul-mouthed Puckish Dionysius, who swears with gusto, cracks sex jokes, and has a youthful history full of immoral pursuits. In other words, not unlike many of the food service professionals I worked with in the years I worked in restaurant kitchens. For another thing, if you think you might want to become a chef because it sounds romantic, definitely read this book and become disabused of the notion quickly. It's tough and demanding work that takes a toll, especially at the higher levels of prestige and service, but which can be very rewarding too.While profiling Batali's rise to stardom, Buford recounts his experiences starting out as an unpaid kitchen worker at Batali's famed New York restaurant, Babbo, where he works his way up the chain from prep worker to pasta maker to line cook. But his journey doesn't stop there. Buford is constantly traveling to Italy: to learn pasta-making from Batali's teacher in Emilia-Romagna; to learn about meat from the world's most famous butcher in Tuscany; and more.At its heart this is a book about food from a fan's perspective and Buford is the right guide. In the beginning, he's a barely competent cook, more enthusiastic than capable and we can picture ourselves in his shoes, moving from serving a marginal meal to friends into one of New York's most famous kitchens. Soon enough he's butchering a pig in his own apartment and smuggling secret ingredients unavailable in the US in his suitcase from Italy and taking Italian lessons at a scula in the Village and finally, at the end, being given the opportunity to do what every foodie dilettante dreams of and refusing it.I thoroughly enjoyed the book and read it over three days. It's not a small book and not simple either, but it went quickly because of the quality of the prose. Every time I picked up the book I got a craving, sometimes pasta, sometimes a nice steak, always wine. In fact, I've had a nice glass of red with me almost the entire time reading the book.I am curious how the people that Buford profiles feel about how they were portrayed in the book. Many of them come across as petty and arrogant, albeit passionate about what they do. The reality is that there few perfect saints or perfect rogues, and that we all fall somewhere in between on a continuum between the two extremes. What comes through is that this passion which strays into arrogance is what separates the amateur from the artist and is often a hallmark of experts in any number of subjects, from sculpture to music to food.