Book Review: Heat by Bill Buford

Excerpt from Heat pg 313:

"When I started, I hadn’t wanted a restaurant. What I wanted was the know-how of people who ran restaurants. I didn’t want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer’s knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don’t have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and it’s true, those who do have it tend to be professionals-like chefs. But I didn’t want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human."

This passage comes at the end of Bill Buford’s Heat and is, in part, the answer to a question put to him by Mario Batali. It is also the answer to what has been written over the previous 312 pages. The book starts out with Buford’s tale of working as a “kitchen slave” in the Babbo kitchen. It reels you in with its biography of “Molto” Mario during the book’s first half. Then it chronicles Buford’s travels to Italy where he learns to make pasta and be a butcher, first of pigs and then of cows. But, ultimately, it is about food and our relationship to it. How modern life and the demands of the modern consumer have altered both what we eat and how we eat.

Heat documents a dying craft in a world too busy to notice. Consider the following passage also from near the book’s end (page 301):

"Miriam, who can’t get a pastina to roll out the dough, no longer makes handmade pasta. When her daughter takes over, will she roll it out by hand? In Tuscany, you can’t get the meat at the heart of the region’s cooking, so Dario and the Maestro found a small farm that reproduces the intensity of flavor they grew up with. How long with that taste memory last? The Maestro will die. Dario will die. I will die. The memory will die. Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season."

A pastina “is a local woman who makes pasta”. Miriam ran a restaurant in Italy and Buford had tried to work for her as an apprentice. Dario and the Maestro were the butchers who Buford did apprentice for. Dario is the “Dante quoting butcher in Tuscany” mentioned on the book’s front cover. This is all for clarification.

I highly recommend Heat. I would not have done so after the first 100 pages. I would have pointed someone to Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential instead because up to that point both books are so similar. Both pull back the curtain on the frenetic life of New York restaurant kitchens. It is only later that Heat becomes so much more. Buford is a great writer, read some of those sentences above, read them and weep. I know I do. It is discouraging to read words like that when you want to be a writer. Discouraging and enthralling.