Advertisement
Home Tech & Science Home entertainment

‘Heat’ by Bill Buford

(Jonathan Cape, $39.99)You should know before you start reading this book that the author, Bill Buford, is totally barking mad. Who else in their right mind would give up working as literary editor for New Yorker magazine for a job in the sweat-box, pressure-cooker, flying-plates-of-pasta environment of a top-rated oanhattan restaurant?

Advertisement

But that’s just what Bill Buford did. He started working Friday nights in Babbo, a three-star restaurant owned by one of New York’s best-known celebrity chefs, oario Batali, on whom he was writing a profile because he couldn’t get anyone else to do it.

After six months, though, this enthusiastic but amateur cook was so hooked, he chucked in his day job, deciding he could stand the heat and he’d stay in the kitchen. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant for more than four seconds will know how just plain stupid this is.

Bill basically went from sitting down all day barking orders at hapless writers, to standing up all day – and night – having orders barked at him by a hierarchical team of temper-tantrum throwers who were for the most part half his age. Not only that, he became so obsessed with Italian food he took himself off to a trattoria in the hills of Italy to learn how to make pasta by hand, then returned some time later to apprentice himself to an artisan butcher.

The result of this eccentric mid-life crisis is the gripping Heat: part Batali biography, part Buford memoir, part ode to bits of pig and cow that you have probably never heard of before and hope never to have to cook yourself.

Advertisement

I could not put it down. I ate Italian for a month after I finished reading it. I don’t know how hot a cook Bill turned out to be after all his hard work, but he sure is one flaming great writer.

Related stories


Get The Australian Woman’s Weekly NZ home delivered!  

Subscribe and save up to 38% on a magazine subscription.

Advertisement
Advertisement