Book: Heat
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Purchase @ AmazonAn Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
My guess is that Bill Buford started this journey, as chronicled in Heat, as a better than average home cook. By the end of the book he has transcended into a level of culinary knowledge and skill that most of us can only hope to attain.
Working a prep cook in Mario Batali’s Babo kitchen, Buford is doing research for a simple article. He soon becomes seduced by the kitchen and works his way to the line as a quite competent cook. Next he embarks on a trip to Italy to learn about pasta and finds that the methods and techniques he is learning have descended from mother to daughter for hundreds of years. His final pilgrimage is to Tuscany to learn from Dario the Butcher. He learns much more than how to cut meat. He comes to understand the soul of that particular place and how the food traditions are interwoven with the generations of people that have come before.
The book builds slowly from the everyday duties in one of America’s best Italian kitchens through the Italian countryside to an emotional crescendo as he reaches the epiphany of this understanding of place.
