I recently completed Bill Buford's Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, and it was quite good. If you're familiar with his food writing in the New Yorker, then you know what you're in for -- wonderfully detailed and alive writing about passionate cooks, a real picture of the obsessions which drive a kitchen. He starts off by apprenticing with Mario Batali at Babbo, and then, to Italy, as he explained in a recent interview with the magazine:
What makes our food so plentiful has ruined what makes it interesting. Basically, if you can refrigerate it and ship it, then it’s ruined. What I learned from all these people in Italy — they’re all extreme in their traditionalism — is how to make food with your hands, and how the kind of food that you can make with your hands is going to be idiosyncratic, expressive, and unique to the place where you are. You’re trying to make food that’s unique to the place it comes from. That’s what it comes down to, in a nutshell. The closer the food is to the place, the more intense the flavors — more vibrant, more alive, more of the earth.
If you haven't read it yet, Buford's Among the Thugs -- his memoir of time spent following British soccer hooligans -- is pretty darn essential reading.
What's occupying your reading time these days?
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