I'd assumed anyone who had spent time in Italy knew this stuff. In one passage, toward the end of the book, he crows, 'I sat down with Mario and jabbered away about girello, speculated on what could be done with the sottofesa, enumerated the miracles that can be performed on a shank. Who in his right mind would voluntarily quit one of the publishing industry's most prestigious jobs for a grueling post in the culinary world? Burying the details of his departure from the magazine on page 142, Buford notes that 'a chef has a knowledge about food that I wasn't going to get from books, and I wanted that knowledge.' Then he talks Batali into letting him begin 'kitchen trailing,' a practice by which a neophyte absorbs the techniques of a particular chef.Įven as he profiles Batali, Buford describes his own evolution from a clueless wannabe to a passable authority on Italian food.

You certainly don't get that same sense of desperation from Buford-the fiction editor at The New Yorker for eight years until he left in 2002 to begin researching his book-who treats his detour from the editorial desk as an earnest quest for another skill set. Orwell was literally starving when he accepted the most menial job in the grand hotel's sub-basement. Ever since Down and Out in Paris and London-Orwell's gritty account of, in part, life as a lowly plongeur (dishwasher) at 'Hotel X' in Paris in the 1920s-the gastronomic milieu has been represented in literature as a manifestation of purgatory on earth, populated by misfits and renegades unable to secure conventional employment elsewhere.

Heat by Bill Buford