Heat
by Bill Buford
reviewed by Ben Oswest
This review appeared in edited form in the 8 Oct 06 Sunday Independent. Here’s the link (subscribers only):
And here’s the full review:
Of the many accusations that it’s possible to level against The New Yorker magazine, where Bill Buford was the fiction editor until quite recently – that it is nakedly snobbish; that it keeps a bloodshot, rather cynical weather eye on the Arab world in its Middle East reporting; or that it smugly publishes, with maddening regularity, some of the best English writing on the planet – a denunciation that it’s “machoâ€? isn’t one of them. The New Yorker is for nakedly snobbish cynics who enjoy the best English writing on the planet. Macho it’s not. And that, it seems, turned out to be a problem for Bill Buford.
He had nurtured an interest in cooking for many years without getting much wiser – what with all the fiction there was in the world to reject – and had reached the point where he would attempt grandiose culinary feats at home that always ended in self-harm, to both body and ego. Despite his ambition, all he could cook up was a cloud of black smoke. This was decidedly pitiful, and he knew it, and was ashamed.
Meanwhile, as anyone who has spent time watching food TV will know, cooking had become macho. Hunks of raw, bloody meat were suddenly being executed in public at the whim of swaggering men in toques. Animals were being speared, shot, skinned, sautéed and swallowed in the name of gourmet entertainment. One of the pioneers of the macho food revolution was Mario Batali, co-owner of the hugely successful New York restaurant Babbo. In the kitchen on TV, Mario was everything that Buford was not, as the latter repeatedly had occasion to remark, and rue.
But, in a twist, Mario was also the ace up Buford’s apron – his ticket out of the life of sedentary, testosterone-sapping desk work. Meet Heat, Mr. Buford’s mid-life crisis, a compelling account of his expedition into the heart of Babbo, just a few blocks up from his Times Square office – and, from Babbo, into the heart of Tuscany, truly a world away.
The book’s title ostensibly refers to the hellish heat that a three-star New York City restaurant’s kitchen generates when in full swing during the Friday evening rush. It also alludes, naturally, to the varying degrees of heat required to transform simple ingredients – flour, water, eggs, butter and olive oil, a prime cut of meat or a carcass’s remains (calf brains, anyone?), a few vegetables, herbs and zests – into the masterpieces of Italian cuisine.
But there’s more to this word (rhymes with eat!) than that. The heat in this book is also, manifestly, the heat in death’s panting breath, which the not-getting-any-younger Buford has begun, ever so lightly, to feel on his back. It is, moreover, the heat of shame – a necessary ingredient in any manhood ritual – which burns in Buford’s cheeks with alarming regularity as he, the novice, fumbles with food under the terrible gaze of his new masters. You must endure trials before you can move from being an editor to being counted among the true cooks and butchers of this world, after all.
Between the two professions, the cooks gave Buford the hardest time, and it’s when he’s at his lowest that his book yields its most pleasurable moments. After getting a New Yorker profile of Mario and Babbo assigned to himself (perks of the desk job), he makes the chef an offer that no self-respecting American on the road to riches and fame could refuse, summarised as follows: “Let me, one of the most powerful arbiters of taste in the USA, be your bondsman, for free.â€?
Mario accepted, and Buford became a slave, assuming the role of a baboon runt in a tiny, enclosed, windowless cage-kitchen full of Babbo alpha-males and -females. His nickname was “Kitchen Bitch�. It was a rough ride from start to finish, but not without its rewards, and the tale of how, eventually, Buford covered himself in something like glory at the restaurant is told with grace, in a fine, well-paced style, and makes up about one cup of his two-cup book.
The ingredients of the other cup are a bit dull by comparison, but benefit greatly in having a character mixed in who’s even more fantastical than Mario: a Tuscan butcher named – can you guess? – Dario. If Mario is Zeus, then Dario is Neptune, an impossibly moody tyrant given to shouting everyone down with verses from Dante’s Inferno, and dedicated to preserving Renaissance (please! – Risorgimento) food traditions at all costs, including women, friendship and custom. (Then again, when he loves he loves big: Heat’s most enduring image is of a Sunday festa at the butchery, with scores of people crammed inside enjoying Dario’s largesse, their faces smeared with raw white pig fat “like toothpasteâ€?.)
In contrast to Babbo, Dario’s butchery is positively serene – it’s no inferno – and if you happened to enter it a few years ago, and had gone downstairs to look around, there you would have found Billy, apprentice butcher, learning the mysteries of a cow’s thigh under the steady instruction of a man called, simply, the Maestro. You probably would have addressed them in your broken Italian, and Billy would have grunted back in the same language.
It is for this fact that Buford’s book, well-crafted as it is, gets just two stars, not three. For all its tone of serious purpose mixed with humorous self-deprecation – there are several laugh-out-loud moments during his many quests – the author never breaks free from his state of ignorance about himself. Why is Buford obsessed with grasping the golden fleece that he imagines true Italian cooking to be? The more he learns, the less inquisitive, philosophically, he becomes.
By now, it counts as a rank cliché for a metropolitan, prodded by a sense of disconnection ascribed to his hyper-industrialized surrounds, to embark on a vision-quest in pursuit of something he imagines to be authentic. Buford, apparently, can’t see this. He knows he’s a clown on one level, but not the next. The moment that he is mistaken for a Tuscan butcher constitutes the real golden fleece for him – not the knowledge of how to extract the campanello cut from a leg of beef. The proof is Heat itself, which commodifies his new-found understanding not as food but as – story.
This, ultimately, is where Heat leads us: into story, into myth. Buford presents an Italy last seen in EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, and the two titans who rule it – Dario, in Italy itself, and Mario, who keeps great swathes of it in his head – are beyond the judgement of men. They are men unto themselves, macho men, and in the maelstrom of their machoness, by submitting to them, being mastered by them, then partaking of their mastery, Buford is born into their world. He is an editor no longer, but an authentic adept of culinary arcana, like them. Authenticity is virtue, virtue is immortality. The heat in Heat is finally the flush of triumph at making it – at being able to write your own legend.
This is what Buford is doing, and for it, like Mario (Zeus) and Dario (Neptune), he deserves a second, mythical name. How about – Nabob? His riches, after all, come from exotic places. Next, he’s apparently due to start nattering on about – che disi?! – the cuisine of France.
