Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany
by Bill Buford
Jonathan Cape £16.99, pp325
Bill Buford's new book of existential journalism is about the world of food. His subtitle covers plenty of ground, but he throws in brief biographies of well-known modern chefs and some scholarly history (Buford can plausibly claim to have established the first reference to eggs as an ingredient of pasta). The result is funny, well written and slightly exhausting.
By existential journalism, I mean the total-immersion method pioneered by George Plimpton in the Fifties. To find out about professional sports from inside, Plimpton would train and even play with a team. This approach, like method acting (with which it has points in common), tends to be American. It requires patience, determination and a certain amount of masochism.
Buford started out by writing a profile of New York chef Mario Batali for the New Yorker. At some stage, this mutated into the desire to work for Batali at his three-star restaurant, Babbo. Buford gives a muffled impression of midlife crisis: if, as he says, he was tired of all the sitting involved in his previous life as a magazine editor, he could have splashed out on a lectern. His wife was dismayed when Buford later proposed to move to Italy to cut up animals, but the details of the accommodation they reached aren't clear. She is referred to from time to time as being with him in Italy, but it seems unlikely that she chucked in her editorial job in New York to join the hunt for the perfect bistecca fiorentina. Buford's obsession with food and its preparation is genuine, but writers' obsessions are always canny and a book contract makes a useful safety net.
When he first turned up for work at Babbo, Buford didn't bring his own knives, much to the annoyance of his new colleagues. He hadn't understood that knives were not regarded as kitchen equipment, but more or less part of the cook's body. Strangers lent him knives hardly more willingly than they would have donated him kidneys. His experience of preparing food up to that point was as a giver of overambitious dinner parties - he didn't even know to keep the point of a knife in contact with the chopping board for greater control. He had given his finger a deep cut within half an hour.
Buford's title compresses an archetypal American proverb directed against those who complain about their choices. When he was promoted to line cook, the heat became a physical ordeal. At the end of a shift, he resembled a processed meat product himself, a fathom of human sausage, dehydrated (his urine dark), sweating out the accumulated stinks of the day.
Cooking can be a finicky business, but not the way Mario Batali does it. He approaches cuisine as if it was an extreme sport. An early exploit as an amateur was to come up with an accompaniment for a block of foie gras from an almost denuded kitchen. It was a sweet, vinegary reduction made with orange soda and Starbursts (formerly known as Opal Fruits).
Those of us who had dealings with Buford in his earlier incarnation as an editor didn't find him short on testosterone but in his new context, he seems benign, virtually eunuchoid. Of the various culinary masters he meets in the book, only one has no temperament (the mentor of Tuscan butchery known as Il Maestro), and only one - that kitchen kamikaze, Marco Pierre White - has a genuine one, as opposed to the vice of using his moods to manipulate others.
Mario Batali exaggerates an already outsized personality for television (it's his media presence that guarantees the queues outside Babbo). His mother was French-Canadian, his father an Italian immigrant. When he went to Italy in 1989, already an acclaimed sous chef in California, to learn traditional cooking at a restaurant in a town called Porretta Terme, he didn't speak the language.
He was astonished to be served white truffles as part of a family dinner, not understanding that truffles are free - if you can find them. The restaurant was closed that night and the truffles wouldn't improve by being kept. Seasonal gluts are part of the economics of scarcity.
Babbo in New York continues to trade on the authenticity of that apprenticeship in Italy. What goes on in a restaurant is supposed to be the essence of cooking. It can seem more like the opposite of cooking. Buford isn't writing an exposé, along the lines of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but he might as well be. Something that starts out as a formal version of what an Italian grandmother might serve her family turns into an orgy of extravagance, hucksterism and dodgy hygienic practice.
Batali would play Bob Marley songs on the sound system, knowing the New York Times restaurant critic was a fan. He would berate staff who failed to recognise celebrities, who must be served first and given special treatment. To make a humble fish soup called cioppino, he would rummage through bins and chopping boards, collecting left overs (tomato pulp, carrot tops, onion skins), then price the dish at $29 and tell the waiters to sell the hell out of it or be fired. Short ribs prepared in advance, wrapped so tightly in plastic wrap and foil that they wouldn't spurt sauce if stepped on, would keep in the walk-in fridge for up to a week.
Any self-respecting grandmother would slap Batali's face for any of these crimes. When Buford cut his hand (again) and put on a plastic glove, he was told to take it off again. He needed the wounded finger to test the doneness of meat. Other cooks preferred to test by pressing their lips against it. How do you like your steak? Unkissed.
There's an odd, homogenising drive in American culture, from which Batali isn't entirely immune, since he has cockle-clams delivered twice weekly from New Zealand for linguine alle vongole for the sake of their uniformity of size. This global traffic in standardised molluscs completes the transformation of simple food into fetish dish.
American regulations prohibit the serving of wild game and take an equally hard line on raw-milk cheeses. It's as if there was a positive plan to remove strong tastes from the national experience. Industrialised eggs become pale-yolked shadows of themselves. An Italian recipe for pasta, for instance, might prescribe four etti of flour and four good eggs (even in Italy, the best eggs are the bad-boy eggs, the ones not officially passed for sale). No water, no salt, no oil.
When star pasta maker Valeria Piccini came to New York to give a masterclass, as Bill Buford relates, she relied on local ingredients and couldn't make the dough behave. At Babbo, Mario Batali compensated for the weakness of his eggs with fancy footwork: four etti of flour plus three whole eggs, eight extra yolks, salt, oil and water. If one of New York's top chefs can't lay his hands on a decent egg, then the whole enterprise is a losing battle. This cuisine is a luxury penthouse with no building to support it.
Ezra Pound's example of a piece of culture that couldn't be appropriated was the fresco - it's part of a wall. The fresco does not come to you. You must go to it (this, admittedly, before breakthroughs in photography and conservation). He might as easily have cited pasta fresca. Dried pasta is a convenience food. Handmade pasta is an inconvenience food, deteriorating by the hour and the kilometre of travel. Like most traditional cooking, it depends on valuing women's domestic labour at zero pence an hour. The moment women have other options, they take them. When a traditional pasta maker confesses that, being unable to find a pastina (a woman to roll out the dough), she now uses a machine, it's Buford who seems the more upset of the two.
At some stage, it becomes clear that Bill Buford, the kitchen dolt who didn't know how to chop an onion, has more skills at his fingertips than anyone else, quite possibly, in all history. In a world where expertise runs narrow and deep, his knowledge is broad. Mario Batali may be king of the kitchen at Babbo, but he wouldn't know how to go at a dead cow with a knife.
When Buford went to Tuscany to study traditional butchery, he didn't like all the meat products he learned to prepare. There was a style of terrine he couldn't imagine anyone eating 'unless they were very poor and without a refrigerator and hallucinating from starvation'. Perhaps he should go easy on the comic tone at this point. If he has bent his life out of shape to master a disgusting cuisine, the joke's on him.
He soon realises that Dario Cecchini, the butcher who takes him on as an apprentice, is a sort of elegist in animal flesh. His meat products are monuments to a tradition, not part of one. They bear the same relationship to traditional preparations as folk songs arranged for the concert hall do to the vanishing originals. Even so, it's a shock when Buford realises that the beef itself arrives in trucks from Spain.
The farming practices of Chianti have changed and the celebrated cow of the area, the chianina, tall, white and narrow, is no longer part of the landscape. Where the breed survives, it isn't up to Dario's standards, since the meat isn't conditioned by a life of labour.
If traditional butchery and animals worthy of it are now separated by many hundreds of miles, then tradition is being kept artificially alive for a few romantics. Here, too, for all his energy and literary skill, not to mention justifiable pride in his accomplishments, Bill Buford gives the sense of an ending.