Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
Review by Darren Sutherland
Heat
by Bill Buford
Knopf
$25.95
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Heat, a witty and exuberant new book by former New Yorker fiction editor Bill Buford, begins with a no-holds-barred dinner party to which Buford, to the horror of his wife, invites celebrity-chef Mario Batali. Batali arrives with an armful of wine, a dense slab of lardo (cured pig fat), and enough high spirits to keep the guests dancing until four in the morning. Buford, an amateur chef, i.e. “more confident than competent”, doesn’t get to cook that night as Batali hijacks the duties, but the evening propels him on an engaging, and grueling, two year culinary adventure from the kitchen at Batali’s famous 3-star New York restaurant, Babbo, to the Italian countryside to learn the pleasures and pitfalls of truly homemade food.
Leaving his post at the New Yorker, Buford shows up for his unpaid tenure in the Babbo kitchen wide-eyed, but willing. It’s one thing to cook a five-course meal for eight, and quite another to spend the first 6 hours of your day dicing hundreds of carrots into perfectly shaped cubes, and the next eight hours with your arms searing over a 500 degree grill. Through his kitchen pratfalls, Buford picks up enough wisdom to get by, and finally to be given a station on the line. He also documents the inner politics and personalities of a high-octane, high-end restaurant in a way that is both amusing and engaging.
His masochistic streak not sufficiently satisfied by Babbo’s kitchen, Buford embarks to Italy to learn the intricacies of making pasta by hand, and finally to work for the crazed and famously-respected Tuscan butcher, Dario Cecchini. In Italy, he begins to discover the true meaning of locally-produced food. Delving into the culinary history of Tuscany, he considers the connection between local diets and the landscape. In Porretta, vegetable consumption is seasonal (June is wild lettuce and nettles, July is cherries and wild strawberries), because the climate is too cold and rugged to produce varied growth, and importing is too expensive. However, they have an abundance of wild boar, and mushrooms, so that white truffles that cost hundreds of dollars elsewhere grow for free in the hills, and by the end of September porcini are abundant enough to throw out- “Basta!”.
Buford’s writing skill (he also was a founder of Granta) allows each scene and each character to leap from the page with complex beauty and vitality. Dario, the Dante-quoting Tuscan butcher of the title, comes across with enough charisma and complexity to support a full-length book on his own. At some point in this book, or at many, you will likely find yourself wanting to jump out of your chaise, buy a ticket to Italy, and go spend your time holed up in a chaotic Italian butcher shop, being abused by an intoxicated and half-mad tyrant wielding a meat-cleaver. That is the odd charm of this book.
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