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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Heat: An
Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice
to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Delicious Thanks to Bill
Buford’s fine writing, reading his account of experiences with great chefs and
outstanding cuisine is almost as tasty as the food itself. In Heat: An
Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice
to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, Buford relates his experiences at Babbo with celebrity chef Mario Batali,
and with Marco Pierre White, followed by sojourns to Italy where he explores
the centuries of experience in preparing great food, and in finding the best
ingredients. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, pp. 26-31: Like many Elisa was routinely
greeting chefs-in-training at seven in the morning and telling them how her
kitchen worked. Every three months or so, that’s what she did. They needed
her, to complete their studies, and she, I was starting to learn, needed them
to complete all the things she had to do in a day. The difference between
them and me was obvious and accounted for my continuing testing time. She
kept thinking of me as someone who should know what he was doing. One
morning, she instructed me to run to the basement for twenty-five oranges and
fifty lemons. “Use your apron,” she said, and then, noting my confused look,
sighed and gathered the two corners of hers like a hammock, by way of
illustration. When I returned, she held up a zester.
It’s the thing you use to peel a citrus fruit. “You do know how to use a zester?” she asked
with such poorly disguised irritation that I understood her to be saying,
“Don’t tell me you’re so ignorant you don’t know what this is.” I then became
very reluctant to admit that the zester she gave me
wasn’t zesting—it was so dull it was mauling the
fruit—until my cutting board was a sticky battlefield of maimed oranges and
lemons, and I hesitantly suggested that maybe this zester
wasn’t one of the kitchen’s better zesters. The trickiness of my role
was confirmed one Friday, always a long, stressful day because you’re
preparing food for not only that evening but the whole weekend. I was in the
walk-in, trying to find a place for a tray of morel mushrooms. There was no
place. Elisa was on the floor, transferring chicken stock from a twenty-quart
container into a twelve-quart container, because she needed a twenty-quart
container and none was to be found. (Chicken stock was the only acceptable
meat stock— one made from anything else would be too French—and every morning
a pot was filled with the feet and water and boiled for hours. Chicken feet
are a vivid sight—like human hands without a thumb, curled up and knuckly—and the first time I saw them, bobbing in their
giant vat, they looked as though they were attached to the arms of so many
people, clawing at the churning water, trying to climb out, the bubbling pot
a portal from Hell, there in the back of the kitchen, against the wall, the
hottest place.) Andy was in the walk-in as
well, devising what he called a “walk-in special,” a feature of the weekends,
to clear out an ingredient that wasn’t selling before it went off. “Crispy branzino” was a walk-in special, because “we’ve bought
enough branzino for twenty a night but have been
doing only nine, and it’s nearly Sunday, so we’ve got to move it or toss it,
and there’s some porcini, which hasn’t been moving either, I don’t know why,
and there’s always pancetta, so let’s reinvent our fish dish with porcini and
crunchy pancetta on top and sell the hell out of it.” Gina DePalma
was in the walk-in, too, and she was the problem. Gina was the pastry chef—an
executive role, like Elisa’s—and the two women ran the morning kitchen. Elisa
arrived at six and started on a long list of foods that needed preparing for
the evening. Gina got in two hours later and made the desserts. Although they
had many things in common—both had grown up with big Sunday lunches with
their Italian grandparents, for instance—they couldn’t have been more
different. Elisa was thin and sporty.
On her days off, she trained for marathons and sometimes ran to work in the
dawn, about six miles. (“There’s no point in arriving clean and fresh, is
there?”) Her hair was graying, and she had a narrow, high-cheekboned
face. Gina didn’t exercise. She had thick black hair, and was distinctly
rounder, as you’d expect her to be, tasting syrups,
chocolates, and creamy batters all day. She was the only person with a cell
phone—in the kitchen, private calls were forbidden— partly because she looked
after her own ingredients and did her own ordering, but also because she
didn’t want to cross the kitchen to use the phone located on a wall where
Elisa works. (The issue wasn’t the distance but the company she’d have to
keep when she got there.) Besides, Gina was a talker and couldn’t be without
a phone. Elisa wasn’t chatty.
Mornings would pass without her saying a word. Everything—her manner, the
efficiency of her movements, her face, with its firm, no-nonsense look—said
purposefulness. She was capable of sulkiness (“When she’s in one of her moods,
the whole kitchen knows about it,” Gina complained), but you never learned
why: you didn’t know much about Elisa’s private life. You knew too much about
Gina’s. You knew when, last year, she’d had a date, and what had happened,
and what his name was, and then she’d wonder aloud if she’d ever date again. “Don’t you have a flight to
catch?” Gina asked me. She knew this from the morning’s chitchatty
exchanges. “You should leave. I mean, really,
the way we treat our externs: it’s not as if you’re getting paid.” I nodded sympathetically,
wanting to make nice, a little confused, because I didn’t yet understand the
extern concept. (Externs answer to Elisa, I now understand, and the real
issue for Gina was her belief that Elisa was a dour, unfriendly slave driver.
Or maybe Gina was jealous that she didn’t have any slaves of her own.) Gina continued to stare at
me. I stood dumbly with my tray of morels. “Really, you need to go. Now.” She shrugged and walked
out. Andy, satisfied by his branzino count,
followed her. It was just me and Elisa. “You do not answer to that woman,” Elisa said
in a low, angry voice. She was still on the floor; I was still holding my
tray of morels. “Do you understand me? You leave when I say you can leave. I
am your boss. I tell you when you can go. Have I made myself clear?” I stuttered pathetically.
It was four o’clock—when the prep kitchen is normally finished—but I could
see there was still a lot to do. I returned to the kitchen,
bearing my tray of morels, and thought about what had taken place. The
outburst had surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: I was familiar with
what I regarded as the shoulder-rubbing edginess of the kitchen. I’d seen it
between Elisa and Memo Trevino. Memo was one of the two sous-chefs—a
big man with a disproportionately big head of wiry black hair, and, at
twenty-eight, emphatically in possession of an authority of someone many
years older. If Memo accidentally knocked you, the blow came from the torso,
not because his belly was so big but because he always led with the groin.
More than once a picture popped in my head—no idea from where—of Memo with a
spear and headdress. His was the swagger of a tribal chief. I’d been in the prep
kitchen three weeks when Memo took me aside, wanting
to know what I thought of Elisa’s cooking. I was so unprepared for anyone’s
soliciting my opinion I didn’t know what he was talking about. “It’s not exactly perfect,
is it?” “What’s not perfect?” I
asked. “The food.” I didn’t understand. “Ever notice how much food
she burns?” He was whispering. No, I hadn’t noticed,
although, it was true, there’d been a tray of burnt beef cheeks. “Precisely. It’s
unacceptable. Ever notice the dullness of her knife?” I pondered the question.
Actually, I’d experienced her knife firsthand and had not found it dull. “Let me put it this way.
Ever notice her sharpening it?” “Sure,” I said. “A few
times.” By then I knew the knife rituals. Frank Langello
was especially proud of his. Frankie was the other sous-chef.
He was about the same age as Memo, an Italian American, with wavy black hair,
preternaturally long eyelashes, and the skinny good looks of one of those
crooners from the forties and fifties, like a young Sinatra in the Memo was shaking his head.
“That’s my point—a few times.
You’ve seen Elisa sharpen her knife a few
times. Trust me. Her knife is a stick. The problem is this—she lacks the
dedicated, serious approach. Great chefs,” he explained, “are born, not made.
It’s in your blood, or it’s not: the passion.” I didn’t know what to say.
It was a pretty small space for such strong positions. Memo didn’t like Elisa
because she wasn’t serious enough. Gina didn’t like her because she was too
serious. And Elisa didn’t like Gina because she wasn’t serious enough. (“Most restaurants have pastry chefs
who actually work,” Elisa said most mornings when Gina was chirpily chatting
on her cell phone.) The walk-in episode was
illuminating in another way. When I’d started, I’d
jokingly referred to myself as a kitchen slave. Now I had a new
understanding. I was a kitchen
slave. That was the role: morning kitchen slave. In effect, I had entered
into a contract: I was indentured. In the mornings, I gave Elisa my time, and
she gave me instruction, and the instruction was precious enough that it
entitled her to my time, exclusively, and the Ginas
of the kitchen had better watch how they talked to me. Others showed me how to do
things as well. (“I am a great teacher,” Memo told me after showing me how to
bone a wild boar shoulder, “and people always tell me this is what I should
do, teach, but I have one problem—impatience.”) But most of my instruction
was from Elisa. To my astonishment, she took me seriously. I was a project; I
was being educated in how to be a cook. The truth is, I was grateful for the run-in in the walk-in, Gina and
Elisa squabbling over me: there was so much work that even I was needed. I wanted to be needed. I
longed for a day when my presence would make a difference. Ever since that first
kitchen meeting, I’d imagined my putting in so much time that I’d be trusted
to cook on the line—maybe to cover for someone in an emergency or during an
unexpected crunch. I didn’t share these thoughts with Mario or Elisa or
Memo, if only because I was still the guy who didn’t know how to cut an onion
without slicing into the palm of his hand. And yet I was being taken
seriously: I wasn’t allowed to leave. Or maybe the truth was much
simpler: Elisa needed help, and instead she had me. The subtitle
describing Buford as a kitchen slave is certainly accurate, as the excerpt
proves. Buford’s humility about his skills holds Heat
together. No matter how much you know or care about the world of fine food,
you’ll enjoy the human stories in Heat,
and will recognize the people and the places Buford describes. Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February
2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Heat.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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