Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave,
Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a
Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
Heat is Buford’s odyssey from chaotic home cook (“more confident than competent”) to culinary spiritualist. His book chronicles Mario Batali’s rise to fame (Batali’s Italy becomes part of Buford’s quest), the inner-workings of the restaurant world, and Buford’s culinary journey to Italy culminating in his “theory of smallness.” The journey begins through a birthday dinner party Buford hosted for a friend. Among the guests was Batali (“the most recognized chef in a city with more chefs than any other city in the world ”), who promptly took over the kitchen.
From that meeting with Mario, Buford discovered “he wanted the know-how of people who ran restaurants.” To do that he needed to become a kitchen slave and Mario admitted him to restaurant world as a kitchen slave in Mario’s New York restaurant, Babbo.
That experience awoke an unknown desire in Buford and he had to follow in Batali’s path: he went to Italy to learn its food.
Through his culinary (and culinary-spiritual) journey in Italy he learned that for “millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood the animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons…preserved traditions of preparing food, handed down through the generations…”
But now we are losing that knowledge. Those who still have it tend to be professionals like chefs. Buford is lamenting that this knowledge, how to prepare our own food, is what we, you and I, should know in our own kitchens, “just to be more human.”
The “theory of smallness” is small quantities of food made by hand. In Italy, Buford had to learn to make his hands small to properly roll out pasta dough, and how to make his hands large to butcher beef. He sees the lessons that hands have learned from grandmother to mother to daughter, from grandfather to father to son. And he laments that those lessons, the way food really should taste and the way to prepare food with one’s hands 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.”
Buford’s book is both a lively celebration and thoughtful wake. He mourns the loss of knowing that was passed from generation to generation in the preparation of our food. He celebrates those who still “cook with love” and are passionate about food and keeping the tradition of handmade food alive. A highly recommended and fun read.