"Heat" by Bill Buford

This is the first in what may become occasional commentary on various gastonomical books I read. I tend to get to things in my own order, so I won't promise that they're going to be the latest books out there (hell, I just finally got around to "Kitchen Confidential" in 2011), but I'm sure I'm not the only one who is behind on his reading.

After carrying it in my bag a couple of trips but not actually getting to it, I vowed that on my recent Cape Cod vacation, Heat, by Bill Buford would be the frontline read instead of a backup. It came highly regarded by many, including being mentioned in an episode of Tony Bourdain's "The Layover" where he visited Culinary Arts and Letters on New York's Upper East Side. Sold! We picked it up at Culinary Arts and Letters ourselves when we were in NYC over Thanksgiving, and it took me less than a year for me to get to it (actually, not bad for me!).

But enough backstory -- I remember turning to Patti after I read the prologue and saying, "I already think this book is awesome." I'm a sucker for witty writing. Admittedly, it didn't have far to go with me, between the aforementioned Bourdain endorsement and the fact that it was written by a New Yorker writer, I was predisposed to think it would be okay at worst. But it turned out to be one of the more entertaining culinary books I've read this year.

Buford is a fortysomething writer and amateur ("more confident than competent," he says) cook (no parallels here!) who decides to leave his job as Fiction Editor at The New Yorker to work in Mario Batalli's kitchen at Babbo in the mid-2000's. Having worked in (much less notable) kitchens myself in my earlier years, I'm not sure I'd take that trade, but I admire his dedication. He wanted to learn Italian cooking and managed to get an opportunity to apprentice there. His accounts of prep cooking, frantic service, managing various stations in the kitchen and surviving to tell the tale were comedic in many cases, but enough to make me realize that his footsteps were ones that I appreciated reading about, but didn't want to follow. I also was reminded of the borderline sociopathic behavior that comes out in the restaurant biz (amusing to read, but not so much to live) and had some limited flashbacks to my own much less glamorous stint in Italian restaurant life at an Olive Garden on the north side of Indianapolis in the early 1990's.

Interspersed were tales of Mario's own upbringing and transformation from something of a n'er do well to "Molto" Mario Batali, plus the intertwined tales of the evolution of American food culture in the late 20th/early 21st Century (another source of fascination for me), and some of Buford's adventures beyond the Babbo kitchen, learning how to make tortellini in Italy, and working for a (yet again slightly sociopathic, and in this case Dante quoting) Tuscan butcher. We also learned that one of the worst sins in Batali's mind was to do something the way the French would do it. Heavily reduced sauces, fussy servings -- "too French." Buford talked about the folklore around Catherine deMedici, originally from Florence in Tuscany, that married King Henry II of France, leaving Italy and taking its cooking secrets with her. In other words, all of the renowned French cooking actually came from Italy. Of course that's not entirely true, but there are places where you can trace the Italian influence on French cooking and the Popes at Avignon (a place I've visited) supposedly had Italian cooks.

It was a quick, entertaining read, taking only about half of my vacation, and it ended with me wanting a second helping. At the end of the book, Buford is having a conversation with Batali, where they talked about whether Buford should open a restaurant. But Buford claimed he had a lot more to learn and, like Medici, he needed to cross the Alps and go to France.

It felt like he was setting up a sequel, though I haven't seen anything yet. That said, I did note a recent New Yorker article where he cooks with Daniel Boulud, and I wonder if we're getting closer.