Book Review: Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
The title says it all- if you ever wanted to know what it’s really like to work in a famous NYC restaurant (Mario Batali’s Babbo), to slaughter pigs in Tuscany with a crazy opera singing butcher, to make tortellini by hand, to cut and burn yourself daily and to obsess about food to a degree previously unfathomable, then this book is must read.
Buford is a New Yorker writer and editor who made the mistake of inviting Molto Mario to a dinner party. This led to the events just listed and a true exposure to professional cooking. The writing style is fantastically readable and the excesses of the characters are something you couldn’t make up (eating 35 course meals with cases of wine with Batali, handing out fresh raw pork to patrons at an Italian butcher shop, etc.)
Great stuff!
Comments
Leave a Reply