Heat - Couverture rigide

Buford, Bill

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1400041201 ISBN 13 : 9781400041206

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2006

Synopsis

Rare Book

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

“[Buford] carries on the Hemingway tradition in American letters. Men come to know themselves and achieve transcendence through physical suffering . . . Buford develops a superbly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen and the way professional chefs and their minions operate. It is every bit as revealing as Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, with less of the bombast and posturing . . . Buford struck pure gold in the hard-living, frantic, endlessly quotable Batali, [who] is exuberant, conniving, creatively profane and ingenious when it comes to devising new dishes and selling them to the public . . . [Buford] picks up on the intricate sociology of the kitchen and expertly conveys the interplay of ambition, jealousy, dedication and hard-earned craft . . . Heat is a sumptuous meal.”
–William Grimes, New York Times

“Bill Buford has arrived to chew the fat in delightful fashion, skewering conventional cooking wisdom while enjoying (enduring?) several nerve-racking apprenticeships . . . His coach, mentor, and, yes, warden is Mario Batali, a garrulous, demanding man who proves to be a dazzling character. Batali is lively, lewd, and shrewd . . . [Buford] benefits from Batali’s bombast as well as his own wry mixture of zeal and self-flagellation . . . As for Heat, its meaty morsels will leave most readers pining for a second helping.”
–Erik Spanberg, Christian Science Monitor

“Buford is used to being cutting edge, but he had to acquire a new set of blades to apprentice himself to master chef Mario Batali . . . His play-by-play descriptions of kitchen culture are marinated in a tangy literary sauce.”
–O, The Oprah Magazine

“Heat boasts excellent writing, colorful rogues and highly amusing scenes . . . Buford is a talented writer and he offers up succulent nuggets that may surprise even veteran foodies and devotees of Italian cuisine.”
–Richard Vines, Bloomberg

“At an age when other men’s thoughts might be turning to the golf range, [Buford] signed on to the kitchen range . . . Those familiar with the cuddly public persona of ‘Molto Mario,’ the modern-day Falstaff of the Food Network . . . will find a more complex figure in Heat. In Mr. Buford’s portrait, Mr. Batali is a combustible mix of high-testosterone swagger and outrageous appetites, generous, maniacal, bullying, foulmouthed–part genius and part madman . . . Buford is a graceful, vivid writer, and his descriptions of the characters he meets–and the food he prepares and eats–are a joy to read.”
–Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal

“Give thanks [for] Heat, a funny, self-deprecating, insightful book about [Buford’s] quest for authenticity, at least the Italian version . . . The depths of cookery’s mysteries yield several epiphanies–the ineluctable glories of pasta water, the nature of meat on the hoof, why polenta shouldn’t be stirred . . . His compulsively readable story is a reminder and a guide to what eaters should enjoy, hobbyists should aim to better appreciate, and food professionals, miraculously, can accomplish night after night.”
–Donna Bowman, The Onion

“This is a beautiful, infectious book about disappearing into the apparently infinite complexities of Italian food. It's participatory journalism to the point where, if you’re at all interested in food, it makes you want to participate, too . . . It’s not just food itself, however, that Buford writes about and loves . . . Heat is really a story about people, which is why it’s at its best when describing the gossipy dramas and odd personalities in the kitchen at Babbo . . . But what has stayed with me even more than the kitchen soap operas are the quiet revelations Buford discovers as he studies while he chops and cooks and hammers.”
–Matthew MacAllester, Newsday

“Delightful . . . [A] charming, crazy book . . . Buford never directly explains why the chef's life seemed so irresistible to him, but he shows you, page by delicious page, why the whole enterprise is so seductive . . . Buford is a lovely, precise writer about cooking . . . Heat lets readers share [his] adoration for Italian food . . . Show-stopping.”
–Warren Bass, Washington Post Book World

“Funny, passionate, and beautifully written . . . Buford’s narrative is a delightful meal of savory flavors. [He] uncovers the richness, history, and small-scale charm of Italian cooking . . . Buford may be a culinary apprentice, but he’s a master prose stylist. His descriptions of preparing food, from braised spare ribs to polenta to pasta, are marvelous in their clarity and vivid, sensuous detail. Buford clearly loves food and the people who help him understand it, and this love suffuses every page. Heat is more than just a tasty treat; it’s a memorable meal made with passion and served con brio.”
–Chuck Leddy, Boston Globe

“Fiery . . . Buford perfectly captures the backstage intensity of a professional kitchen and the people who run it . . . The Babbo kitchen Buford describes seems at times like an NFL locker room . . . His immersion in this world taught him a good deal and gives him authority far beyond the mere observer or dilettante. He writes in pleasurable detail about polenta, linguine with clams and short ribs (for which he provides a terrific recipe) . . . However uncertain he is of his culinary skills, Buford needn’t worry about his exceptional gift of writing words to esteem and savor.”
–David Takami, Seattle Times

“It would be a shame if nonfoodies passed on the book, because its interest extends far beyond the culinary . . . [Buford’s] literary persona is a latter-day Candide . . . Heat delivers on its initial promise–we get gossip, we get passion and hilarity, fear and loathing–and then hands us complimentary dessert. With any luck, we won’t have to wait fifteen more years for Buford to dazzle us again.”
–Roger Downey, Seattle Weekly

“Heat is Buford’s witty, literate and appetizing account of his experience studying under several culinary masters. Buford is the ideal guide for a tour of this gastronomic world. Using a conversational style, a keen reporter’s eye, and a good sense of humor and timing, he leads readers on a journey that soon leaves Babbo and travels to England and Italy . . . Buford is not the first person to chronicle life inside a busy Manhattan restaurant . . . But [other] accounts did not include the towering figure of Batali . . . [Buford] knows how to keep the story moving along, and knows when to insert a quip or an incredulous question . . . Entertaining.”
–Connor Ennis, Associated Press

“Buford got to do what every serious amateur chef dreams of . . . Heat teems with hilariously humiliating tales of chopped carrots, skinned lambs tongues and self-immolation . . . Buford’s tantalizing descriptions of preparing soppressata and tortellini will make even the culinary-challenged salivate. Mangia!”
–Nicki Gostin, Newsweek

“Wonderfully thoughtful and personal.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“A food lover's adventure story . . . Buford captures all the rock 'n' roll, playboy attitude of [Batali,] the notorious flame-haired, orange-clogged chef, [and] works his way up to a decent stint as a line cook–brief and hilariously brutal, but flecked with enough brilliant, adrenaline-filled moments to get him hooked . . . Interspersed with his gleeful trials as a clumsy pasta student in an Emilian hill town near Bologna and a blood-soaked butcher's helper in Tuscany, Buford searches for the original egg-pasta recipe and disassembles an entire adult pig in his New York kitchen . . . Overly romantic? Maybe, but delightfully so.”
–Alison Neumer Lara, Chicago Tribune

“A tour de force piece of immersion reportage . . . Deliciously written.”
–Stephen J. Lyons, Chicago Sun-Times

“A marvel, amazing . . . [Buford] gets everyone’s story of ambition and heartbreak, including the dishwashers’ . . . Wonderful . . . Genuinely lip-smacking–Nicholson Baker’s U and I meets meticulous Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. Don’t read it with an empty larder.”
–Alexandra Jacobs, New York Observer

“Exuberant, hilarious, glorying in its rich and arcane subject matter, Heat is Plimpton-esque immersion journalism . . . Batali is only one of the several alpha males Buford renders with relish . . . Fascinating . . . By the end of this full-to-bursting, hugely entertaining and moving book, Buford has progressed from interloper to insider, from amateur to passable professional. He has become an incarnation of treasured culinary arts, thus more physically fulfilled and more fully human . . . With Heat, we have a writer lighting on the subject of a lifetime.”
–Michelle Huneven, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Not since M.F.K. Fisher’s youthful account of dinner in Dijon with her new lover where she recalled every nuanced dish with the same erotic intensity as the lovemaking that was going on simultaneously and unmentioned in her head, have I read such sultry descriptions as Buford’s of food . . . Many will enjoy for its own sake Buford’s well-told account of his midlife apprenticeship to a famous restaurant in New York, the current world capital of extravagant cuisine. What makes his book unusual within its genre, apart from the quality of its prose, is that he takes more pleasure in watching cooks work than in savoring their ...

Extrait :

Linguine with Clams

If you're tempted to make linguine with clams according to the kitchen's preparation, you should understand that the only ingredient that's measured is the pasta. (A serving is four ounces.) Everything else is what you pick up with your fingertips, and it's either a small pinch or a large pinch or something in between: not helpful, but that, alas, is the way quantities are determined in a restaurant.

The downside of measuring by hand is what happens to the hands. At the end of an evening your fingertips are irretrievably stained with some very heady aromatics, and there's nothing you can do to eliminate them. You wash your hands. You soak them. You shower, you scrub them again. The next day, they still stink of onion, garlic, and pork fat, and, convinced that everyone around you is picking up the smell, you ram them into your pockets, maniacally rubbing your fingers against each other like an obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth.

Ingredients
small pinch of chopped garlic
small pinch of chili flakes
medium pinch of chopped onion
medium pinch of pancetta
olive oil
butter
white wine
4 oz. linguine per serving
A big handful of clams
parsley
NOTE: the ingredients and preparations in this recipe are approximate—experiment with proportions to make it to your taste.

Begin by roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process,and the moment everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One—and you are left with the familiar messy buttery mush—but already you've added two things you'd never see in Italy: butter (seafood with butter—or any other dairy ingredient—verges on culinary blasphemy) and pancetta, because, according to Mario, pork and shellfish are an eternal combination found in many other places: in Portugal, in amêijoas na cataplana (clams and ham); or in Spain, in a paella (chorizo and scallops); or in the United States, in the Italian-American clams casino, even though none of those places happens to be in Italy.

In Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy buttery pan and fill it with a big handful of clams and put it on the highest possible flame. The objective is to cook them fast—they'll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. At six minutes and thirty seconds, you use your tongs to pull your noodles out and drop them into your pan—all that starchy pasta water slopping in with them is still a good thing; give the pan another swirl; flip it; swirl it again to ensure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it looks dry, add another splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some out. You then let the thing cook away for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling, until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan, splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner.
The first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali’s friends had described to me as the “myth of Mario” was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when I invited him to a birthday dinner. Batali, the chef and co-owner of Babbo, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, is such a famous and proficient cook that he’s rarely invited to people’s homes for a meal, he told me, and he went out of his way to be a grateful guest. He arrived bearing his own quince-flavored grappa (the rough, distilled end-of-harvest grape juices rendered almost drinkable by the addition of the fruit); a jar of homemade nocino (same principle, but with walnuts); an armful of wine; and a white, dense slab of lardo—literally, the raw “lardy” back of a very fat pig, one he’d cured himself with herbs and salt. I was what might generously be described as an enthusiastic cook, more confident than competent (that is, keen but fundamentally clueless), and to this day I am astonished that I had the nerve to ask over someone of Batali’s reputation, along with six guests who thought they’d have an amusing evening witnessing my humiliation. (Mario was a friend of the birthday friend, so I’d thought—why not invite him, too?—but when, wonder of wonders, he then accepted and I told my wife, Jessica, she was apoplectic with wonder: “What in the world were you thinking of, inviting a famous chef to our apartment for dinner? Now what are we going to do?”)

 

In the event, there was little comedy, mainly because Mario didn’t give me a chance. Shortly after my being instructed that only a moron would let his meat rest by wrapping it in foil after cooking it, I cheerfully gave up and let Batali tell me what to do. By then he’d taken over the evening, anyway. Not long into it, he’d cut the lardo into thin slices and, with a startling flourish of intimacy, laid them individually on our tongues, whispering that we needed to let the fat melt in our mouths to appreciate its intensity. The lardo was from a pig that, in the last months of its seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound life, had lived on apples, walnuts, and cream (“The best song sung in the key of pig”), and Mario convinced us that, as the fat dissolved, we’d detect the flavors of the animal’s happy diet—there, in the back of the mouth. No one that evening had knowingly eaten pure fat before (“At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it prosciutto bianco”), and by the time Mario had persuaded us to a third helping everyone’s heart was racing. Batali was an impressively dedicated drinker—he mentioned in passing that, on trips to Italy made with his Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, the two of them had been known to put away a case of wine during an evening meal—and while I don’t think that any of us drank anything like that, we were, by now, very thirsty (the lardo, the salt, the human heat of so much jollity) and, cheered on, found ourselves knocking back more and more. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. There were also the grappa and the nocino, and one of my last images is of Batali at three in the morning—a stoutly round man with his back dangerously arched, his eyes closed, a long red ponytail swinging rhythmically behind him, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth, his red Converse high-tops pounding the floor—playing air guitar to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” Batali was forty-one, and I remember thinking it had been a long time since I’d seen a grown man play air guitar. He then found the soundtrack for Buena Vista Social Club, tried to salsa with one of the women guests (who promptly fell over a sofa), moved on to her boyfriend, who was unresponsive, put on a Tom Waits CD instead, and sang along as he washed the dishes and swept the floor. He reminded me of an arrangement we’d made for the next day—when I’d invited Batali to dinner, he’d reciprocated by asking me to join him at a New York Giants football game, tickets courtesy of the commissioner of the NFL, who had just eaten at Babbo—and then disappeared with three of my friends, assuring them that, with his back-of-the-hand knowledge of downtown establishments open until five, he’d find a place to continue the evening. They ended up at Marylou’s in the Village—in Batali’s description, “A wise guy joint where you can get anything at any time of night, and none of it good.”

 

It was daylight when Batali got home. I learned this from his building superintendent the next morning, as the two of us tried to get Batali to wake up—the commissioner’s driver was waiting outside. When Batali finally appeared, forty-five minutes later, he was momentarily perplexed, standing in the doorway of his apartment in his underwear and wondering why I was there, too. (Batali has a remarkable girth, and it was startling to see him clad so.) Then, in minutes, he transformed himself into what I would come to know as the Batali look: the shorts, the clogs, the wraparound sunglasses, the red hair pulled back into its ponytail. One moment, a rotund Clark Kent in his underpants; the next, “Molto Mario”—the clever, many-layered name of his cooking television program, which, in one of its senses, literally means Very Mario (that is, an intensified Mario, an exaggerated Mario)—and a figure whose renown I didn’t appreciate until, as guests of the commissioner, we were allowed onto the field before the game. Fans of the New York Giants are so famously brutish as to be cartoons (bare-chested on a wintry morning or wearing hard hats; in any case, not guys putting in their domestic duty in the kitchen), and I was surprised by how many recognized the ponytailed chef, who stood facing them, arms crossed over his chest, beaming. “Hey, Molto!” they shouted. “What’s cooking, Mario?” “Mario, make me a pasta!” At the time, Molto Mario was shown on afternoons on cable television, and I found a complex picture of the working metropolitan male emerging, one rushing home the moment his shift ended to catch lessons in braising his broccoli rabe and getting just the right forked texture on his homemade orecchiette. I stood back with one of the security people, taking in the spectacle (by now members of the crowd were chanting “Molto, Molto, Molto”)—this very round man, whose manner and dress said, “Dude, where’s the party?”

 

“I love t...

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1400041201
• ISBN 13: 9781400041206
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 304