|
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Vintage) |  | Author: Bill Buford
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $3.00
as of 11/22/2009 21:21 MST details
You Save: $12.00 (80%)
New (41) Used (83) Collectible (1) from $3.00
Seller: featuredbooks
Rating:  174 reviews
Sales Rank: 4653
Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1400034477
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.59455
EAN: 9781400034475
ASIN: 1400034477
Publication Date: June 26, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
|
| Also Available In:
| • | Hardcover - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany | | • | Hardcover - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures As Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, And Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany | | • | Kindle Edition - Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen | | • | Paperback - Heat | | • | Hardcover - Heat | | • | Paperback - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany | | • | Audio CD - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany | | • | Hardcover - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany | | • | Audio Download - Heat | | • | Audio Download - Heat (Unabridged) | | • | Paperback - Heat |
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Bill Buford's funny and engaging book Heat offers readers a rare glimpse behind the scenes in Mario Batali's kitchen. Who better to review the book for Amazon.com, than Anthony Bourdain, the man who first introduced readers to the wide array of lusty and colorful characters in the restaurant business? We asked Anthony Bourdain to read Heat and give us his take. We loved it. So did he. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Anthony Bourdain
 Anthony Bourdain is host of the Discovery Channel's No Reservations, executive chef at Les Halles in Manhattan, and author of the bestselling and groundbreaking Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook, A Cook's Tour, Bone in the Throat, and many others. His latest book, The Nasty Bits will be released on May 16, 2006.
Heat is a remarkable work on a number of fronts--and for a number of reasons. First, watching the author, an untrained, inexperienced and middle-aged desk jockey slowly transform into not just a useful line cook--but an extraordinarily knowledgable one is pure pleasure. That he chooses to do so primarily in the notoriously difficult, cramped kitchens of New York's three star Babbo provides further sado-masochistic fun. Buford not only accurately and hilariously describes the painfully acquired techniques of the professional cook (and his own humiations), but chronicles as well the mental changes--the "kitchen awareness" and peculiar world view necessary to the kitchen dweller. By end of book, he's even talking like a line cook. Secondly, the book is a long overdue portrait of the real Mario Batali and of the real Marco Pierre White--two complicated and brilliant chefs whose coverage in the press--while appropriately fawning--has never described them in their fully debauched, delightful glory. Buford has--for the first time--managed to explain White's peculiar--almost freakish brilliance--while humanizing a man known for terrorizing cooks, customers (and Batali). As for Mario--he is finally revealed for the Falstaffian, larger than life, mercurial, frighteningly intelligent chef/enterpreneur he really is. No small accomplishment. Other cooks, chefs, butchers, artisans and restaurant lifers are described with similar insight. Thirdly, Heat reveals a dead-on understanding--rare among non-chef writers--of the pleasures of "making" food; the real human cost, the real requirements and the real adrenelin-rush-inducing pleasures of cranking out hundreds of high quality meals. One is left with a truly unique appreciation of not only what is truly good about food--but as importantly, who cooks--and why. I can't think of another book which takes such an unsparing, uncompromising and ultimately thrilling look at the quest for culinary excellence. Heat brims with fascinating observations on cooking, incredible characters, useful discourse and argument-ending arcania. I read my copy and immediately started reading it again. It's going right in between Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Zola's The Belly of Paris on my bookshelf. --Anthony Bourdain
Product Description
A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali.
Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 174
For a grandson-chef November 1, 2009
Kevin J. Kearney (Switzerland)
We ordered a copy of "Heat" to give to one of our grandsons who is working as a pasta chef during his interim year before going to university. He greatly appreciated both the cooking lessons and the "life/living" lessons.
Batali, Italy, and the search for the perfect pasta... August 29, 2009
J. Carroll (Island Heights,NJ)
Buford's time in Mario Batali's kitchen was well-spent as it allowed him to give us a real look at the life in a top kitchen, from a writer's perspective. By working his way through Batlai's kitchen, Buford is able to convey the difficulty of that life and the search for perfection behind the scenes. Anyone looking to a career in this industry would do well to examine this book carefully and see if they are prepared to make the needed sacrifices. Learning from great chefs and cooks, Buford learns and shares his understanding of the process and art to making fine cuisine. Because he's a writer, his insights are better explained than they are in many of the autobiographical writings of chefs and his personal understanding of the dish definitely has an outsider's perspective.
The only problem I had with the book was to be found in his journeys to Italy. His defense of some of rather more acerbic characters, whether they are protecting how they make pasta or butchering a cow or pig become slightly ridiculous to me. It's as if he became a little too close to the world he was inhabiting and needed to pull back to a more objective range.
But the overall effect of this book will ake you really think more about the nature of Italian cuisine and bring forth a renewed appreciation for the food and those who prepare it.
 A little dissapointed August 24, 2009
R. F. Husted (iowa city, ia)
I found this to be a very slow read. I love food books and the stories of people with food, but I found this to be very borring. I'm not sure why I finished it, I guess I just kept hoping it would get better and pull me in. It wasn't a bad story, just very slow.
 What if Buford's boss at the NYer had him take on a chef as intern? July 13, 2009
KEM44 (Michigan)
What if Batali had promised Buford's boss at the New Yorker endless free meals at Babbo if Buford would take him on as fiction editor? Batali would be saying, Oh, I love to read and I've always had a secret dream about being a writer. And then Buford would spend the next year copy editing the prose of an egotistical chef while also doing his regular job. The author makes quite a deal about the abusive culture in the kitchen, but he seems totally oblivious to the fact that he was allowed to take on a job that normally would require several years of culinary school as preparation. I imagine Batali agreed to let him intern in the kitchen because he would get publicity from it, but neither Batali or the writer seem to consider the impact on the rest of the kitchen staff. Buford borrows someone else's knives, works slowly while learning on the job, and ruins what must be thousands of dollars worth of food, all the while seeming surprised at the increasing level of nastiness around him. In spite of this, the Babbo portions of the story are very interesting. There were many things I couldn't follow: the author's various trips to Italy and where they fit into the chronology, whether he had a day job while interning and how he managed that, how/why his wife indulged his never-ending self-interest, how he butchered a pig in an apartment (where? in the bathroom? what did he do with all the leftover bits?), etc. Considering that the author was a fiction editor, I would think those details would make it into the story. I liked the book and finished it, although I skimmed several of the side indulgences like the history of polenta and the history of egg in pasta, but I think Kitchen Confidential was a much more interesting and gripping story.
 A terrible, disjointed, mess June 22, 2009
D. Tiberio
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
What a mess of a book. I really wanted to like this one, and it comes with many high regards from the food world (and outside as well)... I have no idea why. It is a jumbled mess of disjointed accounts that would make far better individual newspaper or magazine shorts, which I would not be surprised if that was the original intention that somehow spawned into a book. From weak accounts of life inside Babbo which centered inexplicably on individuals with no importance rather than on the cooking/experiences to jumpy tales of the author's time in Italy which don't flow or develop into much of anything. I'm not sure how or why this book has managed such high ratings for what it is, there are much better accounts of kitchen life and even of kitchen life from an outsiders perspective. Pass on the hype, this is not worth the effort.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 174
|
|
|
CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME. Working Dogs | |
