Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

· Sold by Vintage
4.3
16 reviews
Ebook
304
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

The book that helped define a genre: Heat is a beloved culinary classic, an adventure in the kitchen and into Italian cuisine, by Bill Buford, author of Dirt

Bill Buford was a highly acclaimed writer and editor at the New Yorker when he decided to leave for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, one of New York City’s most popular and revolutionary Italian restaurants.

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 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. The result is a hilarious, self-deprecating, and fantasically entertaining journey into the heart of the Italian kitchen.

Ratings and reviews

4.3
16 reviews
A Google user
A very well-written indeed account of a former New Yorker editor & writer who apprentices himself as a line cook in a fancy New York restaurant and travels to Italy to learn about pasta-making and butchering. The book is a marvelous melange: part profile of a flamboyant celebrity cook, part character sketches of other chefs and cooks and the kitchen crew in his restaurant, part hilarious and detailed descriptions of cooking misadventures (he is always cutting and burning himself), and part rapturous writing on Italian cuisine, both present-day and historical (he becomes obsessed with finding the first recipe that calls for egg in pasta, a question that stumps even the director of the pasta museum in Italy). There are also many descriptions of excessive drinking, cooks apparently being a hard-partying bunch. Delightful and delicious.
Did you find this helpful?
A Google user
March 13, 2012
Hillarious, enlightening, and inspiring. Awesome novel.
Did you find this helpful?
A Google user
about amusing chefs; Leslie liked it
Did you find this helpful?

About the author

Bill Buford is a Staff Writer and European Correspondent for The New Yorker. He was the Fiction Editor of the magazine for eight years, from April 1995 to December 2002. Before that he edited Granta magazine for sixteen years and, in 1989, became the publisher of Granta Books. He has edited three anthologies: The Best of Granta Travel, The Best of Granta Reportage, and The Granta Book of the Family. Bill is also the author of Among the Thugs (Norton, 1992), a highly personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism. For The New Yorker, he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1954, Bill Buford grew up in California and was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Kings College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for his work on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jessica Green, and their two sons.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.