Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
by Bill Buford
Knopf

Here's a premise: any book that features superstar chef Mario Batali swilling tequila from a goatskin flask before making a Starburst-based reduction for foie gras can't be all bad.

"Heat," in fact, is not all bad. It's one of the most vivid, witty and utterly engrossing cooking-related memoirs to come down the pike in quite some time.

Buford, a staff writer for the New Yorker, enters the culinary world of "Heat" as a tourist among giants. But a project that begins as an exhaustively researched profile of Batali seamlessly morphs into a quest to become an all-around master of the kitchen. It takes him from his post as journalistic observer/slave laborer in the kitchen of Babbo (Batali's famed New York restaurant), to the backwaters of Italy. There, Buford strives to pry the secrets of real Italian pasta and the art of the Tuscan butcher shop from the grips of bemused local experts.

Wickedly profane, often hilarious and always engaging, Buford injects himself into the narrative enough to engage the reader, but not so much as to turn the book into "Heat: Bill Buford's Awesome Cooking-Related Adventures Wherein He Discovers What a Cool, Funny Guy He is." Indeed, much of the book's punch comes from Buford describing his numerous kitchen-related screwups in sometimes excruciating detail. As readers laugh at the author (or, more accurately, with the author at himself), they're forced to consider: "How would I do if I was given two hours, 36 carrots, and a mandate to slice the vegetables into thousands of absolutely perfectly sized one-millimeter cubes?"

One particularly vivid moment of cooking-related schadenfreude occurs shortly after Buford gets started in Babbo's kitchen. His task: boning 24 whole ducks. Within half an hour, he has managed to drag his knife across the top of his forefinger, creating a spectacular gash. But rather than admit humiliating defeat among his new peers, Buford soldiers on:

I resumed. Chop, trim, twist, pop, thwack. I cleared my board. And, as I did, the Band-Aids started to work themselves loose, and the clear synthetic surgeon's glove started to expand and droop, filling up like a water balloon with my blood.

Much of Buford's writing addresses the unique demands put upon those who are at the top of the professional food service industry. Whatever his position, Buford expertly chronicles the many humiliating, surgically precise, repetitive, and downright dangerous daily chores faced by high-end food workers during their seemingly endless days.

Buford's economy of words is such that he can set a scene of a restaurant kitchen in chaos, deliver an observation on cooking styles or food philosophy, complete several complicated and very funny jokes and be on to the next topic within a page. And like any good writer, Buford uses his chosen topic as a magnifying lens for bigger issues. Spanish-speaking immigrants in the kitchens of New York's finest restaurants? Buford's met them, talked to them, and drawn a fascinating sketch of their lives and times. The decline of traditional cattle in Tuscany? Buford's chronicled it. The overwhelming deadline pressure and restaurant short-hand that can put a line chef "in the weeds"? Buford lived it.

"Heat," in short, isn't a single literary dish — it's a 10-course meal that readers will savor long after the last morsel of text has been digested.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)