Bill Buford
HEAT
324pp. Jonathan Cape. £17.99.
0 224 07184 X
Bill Buford, an inspired editor, did not discover Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, but he published them all together in 1983 in “Best of Young British Writers”, the seventh edition of Granta, of which, in its current incarnation, he was the founding Editor. In his subsequent eight-year-long post as the fiction editor of the New Yorker, he woke up a dozy magazine and introduced its readers to some startling new writers. After which he relinquished his editorial role in exchange for the best paid, least demanding, most rewarding job a writer can have – that of a New Yorker staff writer. One of his contributions was an intriguing profile of Mario Batali, unfamiliar even in foodie circles to British readers. Owing, however, to the might of television, all America knows about the flamboyant, stout chef/owner of Babbo, the highly regarded Manhattan restaurant; a man who with his flaming red ponytail and eccentric raiment, can eat dozens of courses at a sitting, and singly dispatch a dozen bottles of wine over dinner.
The New Yorker used once to have a great tradition of literary food writing – M. F. K. Fisher, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Wechsberg and Calvin Trillin all appeared in its pages on food in its golden age. Sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, brief, signed restaurant reviews again began to appear among the film, theatre and exhibition reviews in the front of the magazine and now, in 2006, constant readers have been treated to bleeding chunks of Buford’s Heat (one of these terrifically entertaining excerpts involved his efforts to butcher a 225-pound pig in the kitchen of his New York apartment). Already a competent dinner party cook, when he began to look into how Batali became a chef, Buford was consumed by a desire to work in a restaurant kitchen, and to acquire enough basic cooking skills (and scars) to “stop feeling self-conscious” and gain a sense of team membership. Heat chronicles Buford’s apprenticeship in Babbo, and his further instruction from Batali’s own mentors in Italy and England.
Seattle-born Batali is Italian only on the side of his “well-paid Boeing executive” father. His mother is of English and French Canadian origin. He grew up in Spain, and when, in 1978, he became a student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he was already determined to return to Europe. Thrown out of his university residence, “suspected of dealing” in marijuana, he worked as a dishwasher in a pizzeria called Stuff Yer Face, and realized he would never become “a Spanish banker . . . living a luxurious life in Madrid”; instead he decided to become a chef. His return to Europe was as a student at the Cordon Bleu in London. This was followed by a job as kitchen “slave” to a Yorkshire chef at the Six Bells, a Chelsea pub, which introduces Marco Pierre White as the second hero of Heat. Buford calls White
“one of the most influential chefs in Britain (as well as the most foul-tempered, most mercurial and most bullying . . . basically illiterate, but because he was so intuitive and physical – “a beautiful specimen, perfect, a classic body, like a sculpture, with broad shoulders, narrow waist” – he could do things to food no one else had ever done before.”
In his tale of shooting with Marco Pierre White, the portrait Buford draws of White is masterly – scary, funny and sensitive. His account of White’s menu at the Six Bells includes roasted ortolan (a rare tiny bird served virtually breathing, gulped down, innards and all, like a raw crustacean). I doubt it, as eating songbirds in Britain has been long illegal, but this is an unusual instance of cavalier research.
Buford does sometimes give the impression that historical truth is of little interest compared to his vivid impressions of life as White’s “kitchen slave” or “kitchen bitch” and the various burns, scalds, cuts and wounds he suffered in the service of masterchefs. But this is only a tease, even though he also refers to the Italian myth that French food originates in Italy: “Italians claim their secrets were packed up and transported over the Alps by Caterina de’Medici when, in 1533, she married the man who became Henry II of France”. Buford nonchalantly seems to endorse this ancient Italian nonsense, but he also reveals that he has actually done his homework, and knows, from reading Alan Davidson’s Oxford Companion to Food, that this is “one of history’s most foolish food fables”.
Heat presents a light-hearted, unfootnoted, but skilfully argued case for the defence of the outlandish Italian view, integrated into an account of the discovery that Antonio Latini’s Lo scalco alla moderna, published in the late seventeenth century, contains the first account of using egg to hydrate the flour for pasta (ie, to serve as part of the liquid needed, rather than using egg simply for its taste), and, incidentally, the first account of using that strange American fruit, tomatoes, to make sauce for pasta.
In fact, it is clear that Buford can hold his own with anyone in the foodie pedantry stakes. One of his trips to Italy in Batali’s footsteps was expressly for lessons in how to make pasta; he stakes the sympathetic claim that there may be a physical reason why the egg of a battery-farmed hen does not make pasta as unsticky and easy to work with as (we can all agree) an ethically superior free range, organic egg. Buford’s procedure is usually to look for a scientific justification in the work of a different hero, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, but in this instance he cannot even be bothered to argue the case. In an amusing discussion of Italian regional identities (his Tuscan radical/reactionary butcher mentor, Dario, “a food cop, enforcing a law of no change”, tells him: “A true Tuscan cannot believe in Christ, because a true Tuscan believes only in liberty”), he assumes that Italy is a single culinary entity; but Heat provides much evidence that the unification of Italy was not mirrored in its cooking and eating habits. And in a culinary Judas-kiss, Buford reveals that Dario’s old-fashioned bistecca fiorentina is not made from the chianina of Chianti, but from Spanish cattle.
Heat is a subtle, expletive-heavy, genuine account of a writer’s engagement with food. Midway through the book, Bill Buford grapples with the grudging resentment felt by Gianni and Betta, Italian mountain peasants who passed on to Mario Batali the secrets of their cooking, the product of their lives of hardship, which, they feel, made Batali rich and famous. This is the real meat in this seemingly meagre but ultimately nourishing book, meat of which Bill Buford seems not to be aware.
