This was par for the course, since Buford takes his time. He got so deeply involved in the food world that he ended up in Italy learning from a traditional butcher. Before we get to that, some context about Buford.Ībout two decades ago, Buford found himself first with a New Yorker magazine assignment to work in the kitchen at Mario Batali’s Manhattan restaurant Babbo and then with a deal to expand the experience into a book. Not in a tremendous, Earth-shattering, I-found-the-coronavirus-vaccine way, but in a daily, almost pedestrian way. “For the next generation, dinner was crunchy, sweet, and golden.” A minute later he's back in the steam and sweat, making polenta for 200, but it's our appetites that are ablaze.Right in the middle of Bill Buford’s recently published book Dirt, I came across something I think might irrevocably change my life-in fact, change all of our lives. “For one generation, dinner had been gray, as it had been since the beginning of time,” he writes.

In between apprenticeships, he finds time to wax eloquently on food and society, as when he considers the impact of corn, a New World crop, on the barley eaters of the Italian north. After a lifetime of pushing paragraphs around, he wants to dig into something more pungently visceral””and that he does, in the most literal way. Having survived 24 years as an editor with Granta and the New Yorker, Buford knows how to build dramatic tension through the gradual accumulation of detail. Ten pages in, we're immersed in the story like a hen in a stockpot. These two locales””Babbo, Batali's 1990s flagship, and Dario Cecchini's near-legendary macelleria in the Tuscan hills””are where most of Heat's action happens. The stakes are even higher when cooking becomes theatre, and there are few more theatrical venues than a celebrity chef's three-star kitchen or an Italian butchershop lorded over by a Dante-quoting, opera-singing, and quite possibly bipolar extrovert. Of course, any real cook knows that the culinary arts combine the volatility of a chemistry experiment with the emotional pressures of international diplomacy. Read this book and cooking will never again seem a benign chore. You want sweat? Try slaving over an industrial-strength grill in the sticky heat of a Manhattan summer, with a half-cut Mario Batali breathing down your neck and occasionally dashing your carefully composed entrées to an already treacherous floor. You want gore? Buford's got it, especially when he lugs a freshly butchered pig into his New York City apartment and proceeds to make a meal””or 450 meals””of it.

Arguments, Bill Buford's brilliant new memoir reads like battlefield reportage?””or, more precisely, battlefield reportage from a war waged mano a mano with knives, clubs, spears, and knuckles.

Bill buford heat review