Eating Books: Heat by Bill Buford

I recently finished reading Bill Buford’s Heat, a perspective on food by an enthusiastic outsider thrown into the flames of a professional kitchen. Heat engages the reader with a three pronged approach. Buford not only enters the kitchen of Babbo as an intern, but provides a detailed account of how Babbo’s chef Mario Batali became a larger than life food celebrity. He also travels to Italy to learn what Batali learned and understand the roots of the food he learned to prepare while working in Babbo kitchen.

As a food lover and home chef, what makes this book so interesting is not simply the look inside a three star kitchen, or at Italian cooking, or at the personality quirks of a chef like Batali, but the perspective from which these stories are told. There have been books about famous chefs and famous kitchens and culinary travels but what Heat does is transport the average at home reader into a new position. We get to see Buford evolve from being a helpless kitchen slave to butchering a whole pig in his New York City apartment. The metamorphosis can make any common chef dream of becoming an expert cook provided we don’t mind giving up a few years time and tolerating scalded hands, sliced knuckles and some verbal abuse from time to time.

Bill Buford piques our interest using humor with descriptions from Mario Batali telling Buford’s wife, “You will eat your pasta or I will rub shrimp across your breasts” to a detailed account of the famous butcher Dario Cecchini and his antics (he has especially poor restaurant manners.). His ability to make us laugh at his misfortune (usually resulting in personal injury) and sometimes cluelessness in the kitchen helps us enjoy the narrative, but also helps draw us in to his passionate descriptions of the food.

It is the descriptions of the cuissine and cooking and the way that Buford is able to convey the culinary passions of the characters he encounters that make this a special book. While there are no recipes included, I found myself taking inspiration from many of the preparations and histories that Buford clues us into. The grandest praise that I can give this book is that it made me want to cook and eat all of the food described within the pages. Buford’s passion and enthusiasm for food crosses over to the reader. I found myself wanting to take knife skills classes, make pasta and drink a case of wine.

A good food book should impart a newfound enthusiasm for food upon its readers. And because Buford is more the amateur chef than an industry insider his experience is more accessible to the reader. As we read, we grow with Buford in our knowledge of food and cooking and by the end we find ourselves wanting to go through the same rigorous education on the preparation and origins of good Italian food and to eat it too.



Some links about Batali and Heat

Mario Batali’s website. I am making it my mission to eat at every one of his NY restaurants during my two week spring break.

A fun discussion about “Adventurous Eating” from NY magazine, may 2005.

An interview with Bill Buford at Epicurious.com

A recent discussion with Mario Batali from Serious Eats. The comments below are very amusing as well.