My morning and evening commute has been a delight of late - I've been listening to Heat by Bill Buford on CD. Bill does his own recording, and the listening experience is doubly rich. The sense memories, the relationships, the inflections, the rhythm of his writing, all come to life in ways that of course no one else could conjure.
An intriguing title on many levels, but for our purposes here, Heat pertains to his synchronistic journey into the kitchens of some of the finest cooks on the planet, to learn what they were willing to teach him, and all those delicious, no pun intended, things one discovers about oneself along the way.
What I didn't realize until I got my hands on a copy of the text is that the recorded version is abridged. But that only means that there are more treasures awaiting me, and that my "first time" with this material is not yet over.
The journey begins with Buford apprenticing himself to chef Mario Batali of Food Network fame, and the employees in one of Batali's NYC restaurants, as a kitchen slave. Tracing Batali's culinary roots is also an integral thread of the narrative, and the affection Buford has for this red-haired, pony-tailed agent provocateur is evident throughout.
From what little I know of Mario by watching a few episodes of Iron Chef and Molto Mario, he seems like the kind of guy you either love or hate. "Wretched excess is just barely enough," a quote of his from the book, pretty much captures him perfectly in my mind, and while I'm fairly certain that after being in his company for more than an hour I would expire in an exhausted heap, I think I'd love the guy too.
Buford zips across the Atlantic many times to interview friends and former colleagues of Mario's, often to apprentice with them as well, for months at a time. The sections of the story that detail his stints in Italy are particularly evocative for me, and the last few days my brain has been marinating, no pun intended, in memories of the three years I lived there, way-y-y-y-y-y-y-y back in another lifetime.
The small towns, the characters who are larger than life, the olive oil, the wine, the wood stove ovens where bread that has no equal is made, the country farms - oy, I am homesick when I read one of these books. Agony, I tell you, but welcome agony.
Two nuggets that I take away from this encounter with the divine. One, Buford captures eloquently the relationship between the market and the land. It's not so much fast food versus slow food, as it is small food versus big food. And the other, what I see as profound insight into why we are here on this orb: "I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human."
Bill, you nailed it.
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