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

5.0

"Bill Buford likes to surround himself with histrionic people, whose antics frequently cross the line into violence. First, it was the soccer hooligans. Now it's three-star NY chef Mario Batali and Italian butcher Dario Cecchini. You can imagine Buford and Batali, into their fifth bottle of wine in a dim New York hot spot at three in the morning, Buford regaling the imbecilic escapades of the Man United fans in the eighties, and Batali savoring (and interrupting) every detail. Not content with his job as New Yorker fiction editor, Buford abandons his day job to be a kitchen slave in Babbo and later an apprentice to a pasta maker and a butcher in Italy. An excellent read for foodies. Selected quotes:

Chicken feet are a vivid sight--like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly--and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many people, clawing at the churning water; trying to climb out, the bubbling pot a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the hottest place.

The burden was in the fact that the polenta was never made first thing. It was always the seventh or eighth thing. So if you got busy and forgot--if suddenly, at four-thirty, you found yourself saying, \""Oh shit, the polenta!\""--you were in trouble. You can't crush three hours of slow cooking into sixty minutes. For emergencies, a box of the instant was hidden on the top shelf of the walk-in, but to use it was considered a failure of character. It also rendered Frankie apoplectic, who took these lapses as personal slights. \""You're doing this to humiliate me,\"" he'd say to whoever he'd just spotted, tiptoeing like a shoplifter, clandestinely slinking off with a box of the instant an hour before the service started. \""You're doing this to make me look bad. You're doing this because you know we will fucking lose our fucking three stars if we start serving fucking instant, and if we lose our fucking three stars I lose my fucking job.\""

One busy Saturday, Dario was serving a woman about to purchase her first bistecca who then asked him if the meat was good. \""E\buona?\"" Dario said, his voice rising theatrically with exaggerated indignation. \""Non lo so. Proviano\"" (I don't know--let's find out.) So he took a bite--the woman's raw purchase--chewed it melodramatically, swallowed, said, \""Yes, it's good,\"" wrapped it up, and gave the woman her change. The woman, aghast, took her package and fled. The consequence was that several people asked Dario if he would take a bite out of their steaks as well-as though his teeth marks were an autograph. \""Please,\"" one man said, \""it's for my wife.\""

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