Misstropolis

Monday, March 12, 2007

Heat, Bill Buford Stands It and Stays in the Kitchen

by Susan Graage

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Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, Bill Buford’s follow up to Among the Thugs, the bestselling and highly entertaining account of English soccer hooliganism, is a chronicle of his experiences as an apprentice at New York’s three star restaurant Babbo.

A masterful non-fiction writer, founding editor of Granta, and former fiction editor at the New Yorker, Buford retired his keyboard in favor of a series of apprenticeships and kitchen slave jobs with mad genius chefs from New York to Italy. Buford is propelled along his odyssey by an encounter with the Food Network’s priapic prince of pasta, Mario Batali. Buford engages even casual readers with ample insider details of working in Mario’s kitchen.

Sex is never far from the minds of any of the foodies in the book as Buford reveals one of the essential truths of preparing food for others – it’s seductive force. From the chef Mark, who has identified a signature hook up dish, to the kitchen’s need to survey and debate the price of hookers lucky enough to land at one of Babbo’s tables, to the exhortation of the butcher Dario to Buford to go home and perform his marital duties after consuming large portions of barely cooked beef, carnal pleasures are intertwined with food – with carne – the common etymology of which is not lost on Buford. 

Buford’s experience in Mario’s kitchen leads him to pursue Mario’s own sources – where he learned Italian cooking, the art of butchering and a historical exploration of the evolution of Italian recipes, in particular trying to determine the validity of the nationalist contention that the Italians are the true architects of French food. In fact, the relentless search for authenticity in cuisine and the desire to find the purest ingredients are crusades shared by all of the characters in the book, including Buford himself. Buford’s interest in preserving traditions can be seen in the broader context of the Slow Food movement and the ideas espoused by the author and farmer’s market founder Barbara Kafka, whose book, Real Food, encourages a return to the foods - saturated fat and all, enjoyed by our parents and grandparents.

Buford’s gift, apparent in both Among the Thugs and Heat, is the ease with which he quickly gains the confidence of his subjects in order to provide such an intimate glimpse into their worlds. He extracts a tortellini recipe from Betta, Mario’s original teacher, with the same ease that he discovers the finer points of “going on the jib” (the term for traveling abroad to soccer matches either gratis or for profit through petty thievery) from Manchester United supporters. Betta’s family tortellini recipe is a carefully guarded secret passed down from generation to generation. Ironically she never shared this with Mario, but bestowed this special honor upon Buford.