The Kitchen Reader: Heat
It’s time for this month’s Kitchen Reader book review! This month the selection was made by Stacy of Little Blue Hen. She chose Heat (An Amateur’s Adventure as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany), so I got it from the library and spent the past week reading it.
For anyone who knows me well, that will seem like a really long time to spend on one book, especially when it was a holiday week when air travel was involved. Unfortunately, though, that is how long it took me to make it through.
Overall I can say I enjoyed the book, but it wasn’t as much fun as I expected. The premise is very cool: Bill Buford, a writer and former editor of The New Yorker, basically put his real life on hold to spend many months literally slaving away in the kitchen of Babbo, one of Mario Batali’s famous restaurants in New York, as well as traipsing through Italy on multiple trips, spending months at a time learning from various restaurant owners and a butcher. This is his memoir about the experience, and I thought it would be enthralling to learn about the goings-on behind-the-scenes in a New York restaurant and to find out what he learned in Italy, but the pace was a little slow, and I have to admit, the sections that take place in Italy were my least favorite!
I did enjoy getting a glimpse into the (crazy) personality of the famous chef Mario Batali, and finding out more about how a restaurant works. It had never really occurred to me before that my slice of lasagna was not assembled and cooked right when I ordered it (although logically, of course, I understand it’s not…I’ve made lasagna and it takes a while!) so to read about the author’s experience working his way up from prep work during the day to plating pasta during the evening service was interesting and entertaining. I think I had hoped to glean a little bit of cooking wisdom or practical information I might use, since I adore Italian food, but mostly what stuck with me was the intense nature of working in the kitchen at a restaurant, and the quirky and eccentric personalities that seem necessary to survive in it!
I would recommend this book, but it might be one you put down and pick back up here and there, reading a section at a time, or even skip around and try to just hit the parts that take place in New York, if you are like me and find that to be the most enjoyable.
2 comments
It took me a while to read, too, and I’m a fast reader. I didn’t expect the history that was woven through which felt slow sometimes, but overall enriched my reading experience. I agree that the personalities he wrote about (especially Mario) were one of the strengths of the book.
It was taking me so long to read this that I didn’t finish it! This wasn’t what I expected, and I’m glad to hear that it wasn’t just me.