Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker,… (2006)

I didn't enjoy this book. Compared to other similar food and cooking memoirs, this one has fewer personalities and more food. The problem is that for me, the food does not sound appealing at all. Buford talks about eating serving after serving of lard, he complains when a restaurant entree comes with vegetables on the side, he talks about how employees who leave the restaurant all lose forty pounds, … The food sounds worse and less healthy than McDonalds. Yuck. The book still gives a window into a certain culture, but not a very attractive one. ( )

An amateur's adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.

Good for the beach but not great writing. Too much macho kitchen posturing for me, but with none of the twisted humor of Anthony Bourdain. ( )

Bill Buford became a follower of Mario Butali but went further by returning over and over to Italy to learn more of the secrets of Italian cooking and butchery. The myth was that, under Catherine de Medici, the French stole Italian cooking secrets, becoming the world's foremost cuisine while Italian cuise stagnated. This is not the way it worked. Buford tells about the ins and outs of restaurant kitchens and his quest to become a cook rather than a chef. Quite well written and fun to read. BTW, Butali's parents have a shop called Salumi in Seattle while Butali has a ranking restaurant in NYC. ( )

I learned a lot, and the stuff about working with Mario Batali at the beginning was very interesting, but the bulk of the book is about being kindof an apprentice butcher and pastamaker in Italy, so it's a little slower-moving. Since very little of the book is actually about working for Mario, I felt kinda bait-and-switched -- if I'd read the book expecting it to be a memoir about butchery, I might have liked it better than I actually did. Just not quite as advertised. ( )