Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
By Bill Buford
Doubleday Canada, 320 pages, $32.95
Restaurants are S&M hotbeds. Chefs are sadists, and people who work for them are masochists. The Food Network has introduced us to a few nice guys, like Emeril Lagasse, but serious chefs can't pronounce his name without laughing. No, the real world of restaurant cooking is peopled with total bastards, guys like Pierre Marco White, Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, Mario Batali. Supreme egoists, screamers, party animals and workaholics all, true chefs pass their suffering along as expertly as they can bone a pig. And there is no shortage of people dying to work with them. For free.
Enter Bill Buford, ex of Granta magazine and, more recently, The New Yorker. Curious by trade as well as by temperament, his descent into the world of professional cooking — and his brilliant memoir of it — begins one night in January, 2002, when he finds Mario Batali, a friend of a friend, in his New York apartment as a dinner guest. Within minutes, Batali has nearly anaesthetized the guests with raw pork fat (lardo) and taken over the kitchen after proclaiming Buford's technique moronic. Most dinner hosts, treated in such a way in their own home by one of their guests, would scratch the person's name off future invitation lists. But Buford goes to work for him.
Heat is the story of how an amateur foodie becomes educated. Along the way, he meets some of contemporary gastronomy's most famous figures, including the incendiary Pierre Marco White, who presides over British cooking like Satan in the Night on Bald Mountain section of Fantasia. But like all chefs of his ilk, White knows his food. He can tell you where the best potatoes for French fries are grown (on hills). How to scramble eggs (in the pan, not beforehand). And he's a maestro of fat: "Cooked fat is delicious. Why do you stuff a goose or duck? Chefs today don't know because they don't learn the basics any more. You stuff the bird so it cooks more slowly. With the empty cavity, you let in the heat, and the bird is cooked inside and out, and the meat is done before the fat is rendered. Stuff your bird with apple and sage, and the fat is rendered first."
Buford's time in Babbo, Batali's famous New York restaurant, is a compelling recounting of the tragicomedy of kitchen life. Here, stuffed into a workspace with no room for him, Buford is shuttled, over the course of a year, from prep kitchen, to line cook, to grill cook ("the grill station is hell"), to pasta chef. It is literally a trial by fire. Also by knife. On one of his earliest shifts, while boning ducks, Buford manages almost to debone his own forefinger. "Do you need to go to the hospital?" says the prep chef, accusingly. Buford doesn't. He bandages it up, pulls on a rubber glove and keeps cutting. By the end of the task, the glove has become a balloon of blood.
I imagine Buford has a scar for every thing he learned at Babbo. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that Heat is a season-length treatment for the TV show Jackass: Before the book is done, Buford is scalded, bruised, set afire, sliced to ribbons, concussed by a meat-pounding machine, emotionally abused and, in one particularly slapstick scene, knocked flat on his rump after accidentally falling over and into a huge container of beef.
But the trials are worth it: Buford learns to cook. And because he's a reader and a writer first, he also turns up the roots and traditions of what he's learning. On top of being sterling entertainment, Heat is a trove of fascinating history. Buford traces Italian cooking back to Latin times, sourcing recipes in Platina (a Vatican librarian in the 15th century) and trying to figure out who was the first man to put an egg into his pasta dough.
When he graduates from Babbo (read: survives), Buford is so transformed that he begins a series of trips to Italy to learn from Batali's masters. He goes to Poretta to learn pasta from Mario's teacher, Betta Valdiserri (pasta being a "lady's" art). It turns out to be a highly refined art: Buford can't get his pasta thin enough. But once he passes Betta's tests, he's admitted to Holy of Holies: She teaches him how to make her tortellini. As long as he promises not to tell Mario. (One presumes with the publication of this book that Buford has broken his promise. He's not getting any of my recipes.)
After pasta, meat. Buford travels to Panzano to study under master butcher Dario Cecchini. No stranger man has ever handled meat. Cecchini is a blowhard and a genius, a man who sings and weeps while he works, and who can tell, from a single bite of a cooked steak, where the cow was from and what it ate. His customers buy what he feels like selling them. His meat case is le mie opere: "my works." A customer, pausing to ask if what she is about to buy is any good (the temerity!), receives her answer in the form of Cecchini's taking a bite of her raw meat. "Yes, it's good," he says, packaging it up and sending her on her way.
Buford's experience under The Master's tutelage reveals what may be at the core of all great culinary artists: a touch of madness, madness being the stop just beyond excess. "This guy knows no middle ground," says a friend of the author's after being treated to a six-hour meal by Batali. "It's just excess on a level I've never known before." (The friend went on a diet of soft fruit and water to recover.) The excess is erotic, competitive and daring. Buford has dinner one night with Batali and Jim Harrison, the author and famed gourmand. The two men had once shared 28 bottles of wine in a single sitting, and Harrison, at this dinner, turns down an oyster because he'd recently eaten 144 of them at once, testing Brillat-Savarin's calculation that a gross of oysters, less their shells, was only about three pounds of meat. Harrison, having performed the task, "could not recommend the practice."
In the end, writers are a lesser species of madmen, and Buford, having done his rounds, returns to New York, and turns down Batali's offer to back a restaurant for him. "I didn't want to be a chef: just a cook," he writes. Heat will likely convince most readers that that's all they'll have a stomach for, too, but sharing Buford's table talk is a pleasure not be passed up.
Michael Redhill's new novel, Consolation, will be published this spring.
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