Writer and literary editor Bill Buford swapped his keyboard for a set of chef's whites and became an 'unpaid slave' in the kitchen of TV chef Mario Batali's Manhattan restaurant, Babbo.He tells Thom Blaylock how he stood the heat.
In 2002, Bill Buford, author of Among the Thugs, and founder of the Cambridge-based literary magazine Granta, resigned as fiction editor at The New Yorker to be an unpaid kitchen slave to Mario Batali. Known from his two television programs as "Molto Mario", Batali is the famously gregarious chef and co-owner of Babbo, Manhattan's top-rated Italian restaurant.
Equipped only with a beginner's understanding of Italian cuisine, a reputation as a giant in the American literary world, and a great deal of luck, Bill Buford gained almost total access to Batali and the inner workings of one of New York's most high-stakes kitchens. He started by chopping vegetables in the prep room, and quickly became a full member of the Babbo kitchen. After that, he followed in Batali's footsteps, left America for Italy, and apprenticed himself, without pay, in a rural pizzeria, and finally to a Dante-quoting Tuscan butcher.
His journey through the world of Italian cooking took more than two years, changed the course of his writing, and resulted in Heat, a book that could be regarded as one of the best pieces of American food literature. I sat down to speak with Buford in a quiet, Lower East Side coffee shop before noon on a sweltering Manhattan summer day.
Thom Baylock: What interested you initially about Mario Batali?
Bill Buford: I'd seen him on television, and eaten at his restaurant a number of times and I realised that his pasta, among other things, was really extraordinary. But I think if anything interested me in cooking at that time, it was the French tradition, and Mario really launched me into understanding Italian food.
TB:That's interesting, because the cooks in Heat bash the French constantly. Do you now prefer Italian, even with all that prosciutto bianco?
BB: Prosciutto bianco. Prosciutto bianco! That is Mario's term for lardo [pork lard]. It really did seem to figure in my life throughout this whole journey. It started with him bringing a thick piece of pure back-fat to a party at my place. This was from a big pig - must have been 750lbs, like a little dinosaur or horse. You butcher a pig like that and there's a lot of back fat. You cut it loose and peel it off. Then you rub it with salt and herbs until it starts to dry out. He sliced it very thinly and fed all of us. When I arrived at Dario's [the Dante-quoting butcher] about two years later, that was the thing that everybody was passing around at his shop, but it was a different kind of lardo.
TB: Lardo crudo?
BB: Yeah, pure, raw pork fat. With Mario there was at least a little bit of a curing process. At Dario's, we put the back fat through the meat grinder and it came out looking like toothpaste. We mixed that with salt, rosemary, and garlic then kneaded it on a marble table until it started to emulsify with the air and turned into a pink cream, which Dario served out of a big silver bowl with a rose on top. I made it all the time.
TB: It seems that, at Babbo and the other places where you apprenticed, you did everything that needed doing.
BB: Pretty much everything, except for pastries, and I didn't ever do the starters. Pasta was the hardest job, just because of the demand of the station. Making pasta isn't that hard, but Mario might have two dozen pastas and he rotates them, and each one is prepared differently, has a different sauce, a different dressing, is finished differently. Also, you are standing over this boiling vat of water. At the other stations you can put up tickets to show you what's coming up at what table, and you can watch as the table progresses through the evening. But at the pasta station, with all that steam, you can't put anything up; you've got nothing. It all has to stay in your head.
TB: A short-order cook?
BB: A short-order cook with very complicated pastas.
TB: What was the most surprising thing about the kitchen at Babbo?
BB: Everything was very surprising, but in terms of the most surprising thing that happened to me, it was a social thing. The first night I was finally allowed to work on the line, without anyone's help, one of the other chefs, Frankie, turned on me. That was surprising, just because I thought, "Dude, you've forgotten that I'm a journalist. What are you doing? What do you think I'm going to do with this?" That was just pure copy [for the book] and I thought, "My god, how could you forget." But that was just a function of how accepted I was by that point. Lots of journalists observe kitchens. But I wanted to be a member of it. Even if I was going to be abused, and never really given any rough responsibilities, they had a lot of work to do and I was deemed competent enough to help.
TB: Was Batali worried about what you might disclose?
BB: He's a wild guy. He's attracted to risk and adventure, and I think this was an adventure for him. I don't know how many other people would have let me do this. When I decided I wanted to write the book, after the first New Yorker piece came out in 2002, he came over and cooked dinner and I said, "What do you think?" And he said, "As long as it is about Bill Buford and not about Mario Batali." There were a few revelations about him, but for the most part it was about me. The one line that made him anxious was the thing he said about rubbing shrimps on his wife's breasts, and Mario didn't think he'd said that. The chef sitting with us said, "Mario, you did. As a matter of fact, after a few more bottles of wine, tonight, you're going to say something even worse."
TB: Didn't one of the chefs at Babbo have a big epiphany while studying in Dublin?
BB: That's right. Mark went to Ireland to study Joyce and Yeats and Beckett and ended up wanting to be a chef. What Dublin had for him, what Italy has, and that most of America doesn't, is an agrarian authenticity. It responds to the seasons, and the cooking is connected to what comes from farms. The great thing is that you stay aware of where the meat comes from, the wine, the olive oil - you have a connection to the earth that is very difficult to have in the States. America's great achievement is the mass-distribution of food that everyone can afford. It is what America does. There are some positive points, but at this stage it's more negative than positive, I'm afraid.
TB: What does it take to be a great chef?
BB: My whole background is literary, but I was struck by how much the cooks went through to become cooks, and how analogous it was to what a writer or a singer, or musician has to go through to become accomplished in their own field. It is not like going to law school. There is no route you can take. There are schools, but they just get you started. We are so ignorant of food now, and there's so much to learn before you achieve even a basic competence. It takes years to become a chef, in the way that it takes years to become a writer or concert pianist. And even then you can be a writer, but not a great one. You can be a serviceable cook, but not a good one. You can make a living, but the same unpredictable miscellany of elements that make someone great in any field make them great as a chef: flair, imagination, that elusive charisma. Mario's got it. But just to become a basic cook takes years and years.
TB: It seems as though all the cooks you admire in the book put all their energy into food. For example, you write about Mario's early days in California in the early 1980s. You call it the California Revolution, and you describe the parties he went to where all these young chefs got together and cooked and ate all night long - it is very much like a literary community, full of liquor and prose-swilling writers.
BB: I want that to be something people take away from this book, that the community of chefs is almost identical to literary salons. They are so similar to one another - the way they are driven, the unpredictability of personalities, the imaginations. The difference is that when you write something, it sticks around for a while, but when you cook something, it is eaten and the flavours are gone.
TB: You write about cooking with love. Do you buy into the idea that you can taste emotions in food?
BB: No, but there is no question about the satisfaction in making food for specific people, putting together a plate they are going to eat. There is this weird, inexplicable confluence of appetites, and no reason that they should be related, except that they have historically been related. An appetite for food is like other appetites, other arousals, and they all seem to blur. There is something in sensual stimulation that seems to work by analogy, but I don't think oysters are aphrodisiacs, for example, or that mint makes people want to make love.
TB: Did you mean this to be a "meat book"?
BB: No, it is arbitrary. It becomes a feature because I worked for a butcher in Tuscany. Although I have long held the view, and this gave me the chance to explore it, that meat-eaters don't know meat. The people who do are usually vegetarians. Everyone else is so separate from what they put in their bodies. I don't have a very sophisticated knowledge, but I do know a little - what to do with meat - and I believe in connecting it to the animal. At one point in my life I decided to start hunting, partly because wild animals are healthier than domesticated animals and partly because I wanted to come face-to-face with the knowledge that when you eat meat you are killing. I will not deny that there is a sport to it which is horrifying to many - perfectly and legitimately horrifying - but I wanted to be able to kill it if I was willing to eat it.
TB: What are you most proud of about your time as fiction editor at The New Yorker?
BB: Probably that I made a point of not waiting for writing, but going after writers. As a result we published a lot of young talent as well as much more established writers. Annie Proulx is a great example of that. Brokeback Mountain was the very first piece of hers that we published. It is a great story, a long one, and almost no one else would have run it. Such a great story. I also enjoyed reading and properly enjoying William Trevor, which I hadn't done till I got there. He is such an accomplished talent.
TB: How much editing did you do?
BB: With the great writers, very little. Sometimes I coached someone through revisions, but with Annie Proulx, very little; William Trevor, nothing; Alice Munro, nothing. It is a very nice kind of editing. With fiction it is either there or not there, and it might be down the road with rewrites. Matt Klam wrote something with lots of rewrites, for example, and it ended up a wonderful piece.
TB: What's next?
BB: There will be more books. I just wrote a piece for The New Yorker about dessert. And I'm sure that at some point my wife and I will go to France, but there aren't plans yet.
• Heat is published by Jonathan Cape (£17.99 in UK)