Publisher Description

The book that helped define a genre: Heat is a beloved culinary classic, an adventure in the kitchen and into Italian cuisine, by Bill Buford, author of Dirt. 

Bill Buford was a highly acclaimed writer and editor at the New Yorker when he decided to leave for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, one of New York City's most popular and revolutionary Italian restaurants.Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor. The result is a hilarious, self-deprecating, and fantasically entertaining journey into the heart of the Italian kitchen.

Author Biography

Bill Buford is a Staff Writer and European Correspondent for The New Yorker. He was the Fiction Editor of the magazine for eight years, from April 1995 to December 2002. Before that he edited Granta magazine for sixteen years and, in 1989, became the publisher of Granta Books. He has edited three anthologies: The Best of Granta Travel, The Best of Granta Reportage, and The Granta Book of the Family. Bill is also the author of Among the Thugs (Norton, 1992), a highly personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism. For The New Yorker, he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1954, Bill Buford grew up in California and was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Kings College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for his work on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jessica Green, and their two sons.

Review

"Buford develops a superbly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen. . . Heat is a sumptuous meal." —The New York Times

"A delicious history of Italian cooking, with a twist: Buford, an amateur cook, entered the kitchen of one of New York City's hottest restaurants as a full-time employee, and [gives] us a story of Italian cuisine through the many characters . . . who prepare it, serve it, and eat it." —GQ

"Delightful. . . . Charming. . . . [Buford's] style is . . . happily obsessed with a weird subculture, woozily in love with both cooking and the foul-mouthed, refined-palette world of the chef." —The Washington Post Book World
 
"Exuberant, hilarious, glorying in its rich and arcane subject matter, Heat is Plimptonesque immersion journalism. . . . With Heat, we have a writer lighting on the subject of a lifetime." —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

Review Quote

Praise forAmong the Thugs: "An important, perhaps prophetic, book. . .both exciting and sad at the core. . . . [Buford is] a superbly talented reporter." -The New York Times Book Review "Brilliant. . . . One of the most unnerving books you will ever read." -Newsweek "Animated, witty, and so pungent you can taste the stale lager." -Washington Post Book World From the Hardcover edition.

Description for Reading Group Guide

"Delightful. . . . Charming. . . . [Buford's] style is . . . happily obsessed with a weird subculture, woozily in love with both cooking and the foul-mouthed, refined-palette world of the chef." -- The Washington Post Book World The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group's discussion of Bill Buford's Heat , the memoir of his quest to immerse himself in the world of professional cooking. Part travelogue, part gastronomical history, part meditation on the very nature of food, Heat is an insider's look at cuisine, infused with Buford's manic energy and humor.

Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide

1. Buford says, "I came to regard the prep kitchen as something like a culinary boot camp" [p. 18]. In what ways do the other chefs, Elisa in particular, appear almost militaristic in their approach to cooking? How does Buford's description of the psychical exhaustion he endues help convey the similarities between the Babbo kitchen and boot camp? 2. Throughout Heat , Buford describes himself as a "kitchen bitch" and "kitchen slave." What does he mean? Do you agree with his assessment of his status in the kitchen of Babbo? 3. Mario Batali tells Buford, "You learn by working in the kitchen. Not by reading a book or watching a television program or going to cooking school" [p. 10]. While Batali has done this in his own career, he is also the host of several cooking shows and author of several cookbooks. Do you agree that the best way to learn to cook is in the kitchen? What have you learned from cooking shows and cookbooks? 4. In what ways does Batali's celebrity affect his interactions with the staff of Babbo? How is this especially noticeable in his dealings with Andy? 5. Do you think that Buford is correct in his assessment that Marco Pierre White is the first person to show Mario Batali what a chef could be? Why do you think Batali and White were unable to work together? 6. When the Babbo cookbook is about to be published, Batali tells his staff that they will have to come up with new recipes since all of the secrets of Babbo will be revealed. Would knowing a restaurant's recipes alter your dining experience? Why or why not? 7. Dario and Batali try to waste as little as possible. Likewise, when Buford brings home the pig from the green market, he uses all of it except for the lungs. Aside from the obvious financial motivations, why are all of these men unwilling to let any food go to waste? 8. Buford is completely flummoxed by the lack of interest among the professionals he encounters in the history of pasta. Why do you think Buford is so obsessed with finding out when the egg first appeared in pasta dough? In what ways does he differ from the professionals that he encounters? 9. Throughout Heat , Buford argues that "food is a concentrated messenger of a culture" [p. 25]. What are some of the examples he gives to illustrate his point? Can you think of any examples of this in your own life? 10. Buford goes to Nashville as part of the Babbo kitchen team to assist in the preparation for a benefit dinner. How is this a turning point for him? 11. Before Betta teaches Buford how to make tortellini according to her recipe, she repeatedly makes him promise not to share her recipe with Batali. Why is she so emphatic about this request? Do you think that Betta is right to resent Batali's success? 12. Dario sees himself not as a businessman or butcher but, rather, as an artisan. How does this impact the way that he runs his shop and interacts with his customers? What does Buford mean when he calls Dario "an artist, whose subject was loss" [p. 281]? 13. Has Heat changed your views on dining out and the world of professional cooking? If so, how?

Excerpt from Book

Linguine with Clams If you''re tempted to make linguine with clams according to the kitchen''s preparation, you should understand that the only ingredient that''s measured is the pasta. (A serving is four ounces.) Everything else is what you pick up with your fingertips, and it''s either a small pinch or a large pinch or something in between: not helpful, but that, alas, is the way quantities are determined in a restaurant. The downside of measuring by hand is what happens to the hands. At the end of an evening your fingertips are irretrievably stained with some very heady aromatics, and there''s nothing you can do to eliminate them. You wash your hands. You soak them. You shower, you scrub them again. The next day, they still stink of onion, garlic, and pork fat, and, convinced that everyone around you is picking up the smell, you ram them into your pockets, maniacally rubbing your fingers against each other like an obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth. Ingredients small pinch of chopped garlic small pinch of chili flakes medium pinch of chopped onion medium pinch of pancetta olive oil butter white wine 4 oz. linguine per serving A big handful of clams parsley NOTE: the ingredients and preparations in this recipe are approximate--experiment with proportions to make it to your taste. Begin by roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process,and the moment everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One--and you are left with the familiar messy buttery mush--but already you''ve added two things you''d never see in Italy: butter (seafood with butter--or any other dairy ingredient--verges on culinary blasphemy) and pancetta, because, according to Mario, pork and shellfish are an eternal combination found in many other places: in Portugal, in amêijoas na cataplana (clams and ham); or in Spain, in a paella (chorizo and scallops); or in the United States, in the Italian-American clams casino, even though none of those places happens to be in Italy. In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy buttery pan and fill it with a big handful of clams and put it on the highest possible flame. The objective is to cook them fast--they''ll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. At six minutes and thirty seconds, you use your tongs to pull your noodles out and drop them into your pan--all that starchy pasta water slopping in with them is still a good thing; give the pan another swirl; flip it; swirl it again to ensure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it looks dry, add another splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some out. You then let the thing cook away for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling, until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan, splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner. The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali''s friends had described to me as the "myth of Mario" was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner. Batali, the chef and co-owner of Babbo, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, is such a famous and proficient cook that he''s rarely invited to people''s homes for a meal, he told me, and he went out of his way to be a grateful guest. He arrived bearing his own quince-flavored grappa (the rough, distilled end-of-harvest grape juices rendered almost drinkable by the addition of the fruit); a jar of homemade nocino (same principle, but with walnuts); an armful of wi≠ and a white, dense slab of lardo--literally, the raw "lardy" back of a very fat pig, one he''d cured himself with herbs and salt. I was what might generously be described as an enthusiastic cook, more confident than competent (that is, keen but fundamentally clueless), and to this day I am astonished that I had the nerve to ask over someone of Batali''s reputation, along with six guests who thought they''d have an amusing evening witnessing my humiliation. (Mario was a friend of the birthday friend, so I''d thought--why not invite him, too?--but when, wonder of wonders, he then accepted and I told my wife, Jessica, she was apoplectic with wonder: "What in the world were you thinking of, inviting a famous chef to our apartment for dinner? Now what are we going to do?") In the event, there was little comedy, mainly because Mario didn''t give me a chance. Shortly after my being instructed that only a moron would let his meat rest by wrapping it in foil after cooking it, I cheerfully gave up and let Batali tell me what to do. By then he''d taken over the evening, anyway. Not long into it, he''d cut the lardo into thin slices and, with a startling flourish of intimacy, laid them individually on our tongues, whispering that we needed to let the fat melt in our mouths to appreciate its intensity. The lardo was from a pig that, in the last months of its seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound life, had lived on apples, walnuts, and cream ("The best song sung in the key of pig"), and Mario convinced us that, as the fat dissolved, we''d detect the flavors of the animal''s happy diet--there, in the back of the mouth. No one that evening had knowingly eaten pure fat before ("At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it prosciutto bianco"), and by the time Mario had persuaded us to a third helping everyone''s heart was racing. Batali was an impressively dedicated drinker--he mentioned in passing that, on trips to Italy made with his Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, the two of them had been known to put away a case of wine during an evening meal--and while I don''t think that any of us drank anything like that, we were, by now, very thirsty (the lardo, the salt, the human heat of so much jollity) and, cheered on, found ourselves knocking back more and more. I don''t know. I don''t really remember. There were also the grappa and the nocino, and one of my last images is of Batali at three in the morning--a stoutly round man with his back dangerously arched, his eyes closed, a long red ponytail swinging rhythmically behind him, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, his red Converse high-tops pounding the floor--playing air guitar to Neil Young''s "Southern Man." Batali was forty-one, and I remember thinking it had been a long time since I''d seen a grown man play air guitar. He then found the soundtrack for Buena Vista Social Club, tried to salsa with one of the women guests (who promptly fell over a sofa), moved on to her boyfriend, who was unresponsive, put on a Tom Waits CD instead, and sang along as he washed the dishes and swept the floor. He reminded me of an arrangement we''d made for the next day--when I''d invited Batali to dinner, he''d reciprocated by asking me to join him at a New York Giants football game, tickets courtesy of the commissioner of the NFL, who had just eaten at Babbo--and then disappeared with three of my friends, assuring them that, with his back-of-the-hand knowledge of downtown establishments open until five, he''d find a place to continue the evening. They ended up at Marylou''s in the Village--in Batali''s description, "A wise guy joint where you can get anything at any time of night, and none of it good." It was daylight when Batali got home. I learned this from his building superintendent the next morning, as the two of us tried to get Batali to wake up--the commissioner''s driver was waiting outside. When Batali finally appeared, forty-five minutes later, he was momentarily perplexed, standing in the doorway of his apartment in his underwear and wondering why I was there, too. (Batali has a remarkable girth, and it was startling to see him clad so.) Then, in minutes, he transformed himself into what I would come to know as the Batali look: the shorts, the clogs, the wraparound sunglasses, the red hair pulled back into its ponytail. One moment, a rotund Clark Kent in his underpants; the next, "Molto Mario"--the clever, many-layered name of his cooking television program, which, in one of its senses, literally means Very Mario (that is, an intensified Mario, an exaggerated Mario)--and a figure whose renown I didn''t appreciate until, as guests of the commissioner, we were allowed onto the field before the game. Fans of the New York Giants are so famously brutish as to be cartoons (bare-chested on a wintry morning or wearing hard hats; in any case, not guys putting in their domestic duty in the kitchen), and I was surprised by how many recognized the ponytailed chef, who stood facing them, arms crossed over his chest, beaming. "Hey, Molto!" they shouted. "What''s cooking, Mario?" "Mario, make me a pasta!" At the time, Molto Mario was shown on afternoons on cable television, and I found a complex picture of the working metropolitan male emerging, one rushing home the moment his shift ended to catch lessons in braising his broccoli rabe and getting just the right forked texture on his homemade orecchiette. I stood back with one of the security people, taking in the spectacle (by now members of the crowd were chanting "Molto, Molto, Molto")--this very round man, whose manner and dress said, "Dude, where''s the party?" "I love this guy," the security man said. "Just lookin'' at him makes me hungry." Mario Batali is the most recognized chef in a city with more chefs than any other city in the world. In addition to Batali''s television sh

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