Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

In January 2002, Bill Buford, an editor at The New Yorker, invited Mario Batali to a friend's birthday dinner. Batali, chef and co-owner with Joe Bastianich of Babbo, a celebrated Italian restaurant in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, arrived bearing homemade grappa, wine, and a slab of lardo, the raw cured back fat of a pig. He took over the evening, feeding guests the lardo off his fingers and insisting they detect flavors of the animal's diet. The night devolved into drinking, air guitar, and bar-hopping until dawn. Buford, a self-described enthusiastic but clueless home cook, was captivated. He persuaded Batali to let him work in the Babbo kitchen, beginning a multiyear education in professional cooking, Italian food history, and the craft of butchery.

Buford started on a trial basis in the prep kitchen under Elisa Sarno, an exacting woman in her forties who ran the morning shift. He arrived without knives, without a pen, and without basic knowledge of kitchen equipment; within 30 minutes, he sliced his finger while boning ducks. Elisa drilled him in fundamental skills: the rocking technique for chopping and the rituals of trimming and jointing meat. His first batch of diced carrots was thrown away after two hours of work. The kitchen's key figures emerge: Andy Nusser, the executive chef; Memo Trevino, the senior sous-chef; Frankie Langello, the junior sous-chef whose obsessive knife care masked a volatile temperament; and Gina DePalma, the pastry chef who feuded quietly with the taciturn Elisa.

Interspersed with Buford's kitchen education is Batali's biography. The son of Armandino, an Italian-American Boeing executive, and an English-French Canadian mother, Batali grew up near Seattle and pivoted from college at Rutgers University to cooking after working at a pizzeria called Stuff Yer Face. At the Cordon Bleu in London, he worked under Marco Pierre White, a young and brutally temperamental chef whose genius revealed to Batali how much he had to learn. The experience ended after four months when Batali sabotaged a sauce and walked out. After touring European restaurants, he arrived in 1989 at La Volta, a trattoria in Borgo Capanne above Porretta Terme. There, Betta Valdiserri taught him handmade pasta and Bolognese ragù, while her father, Quintiglio, introduced him to seasonal, land-based cooking. Back in America, Batali failed at a partnership running Rocco, a restaurant off Bleecker Street, then opened a tiny place called Pó. A positive New York Times review and his debut on the Food Network's Molto Mario in 1996 expanded his celebrity, leading to Babbo, which earned three stars from the Times.

Having mastered braising, the prep kitchen's foundational technique, Buford moved to the line. He trained at the grill station under Mark Barrett, learning to cook branzino (sea bass) over open flames and to judge meat doneness by touch. On a 93-degree June night, he was "hammered" for the first time: Dozens of lamb chop orders cascaded in while fat pooling under the grill caught fire. He discovered the adrenaline that drives line cooks and the stark divide between the kitchen's raw reality and the civilized dining room. Batali fired him one night for serving undercooked pork and overcooked rabbit. As Frankie explained, the humiliation was a rite of passage: "It's happened to all of us. It's how you learn. Welcome to Babbo."

Buford then moved to the pasta station, where the demands shifted to speed of recall: instant memory of dozens of preparations distinguished by minute variations. He learned the science of emulsions, the art of using starchy pasta water as a sauce binder, and the revelation that a dish of linguine with clams is about the interaction between pasta and sauce rather than either element alone. In separate trips to London, Buford also visited White, now a restaurant tycoon who no longer cooked, learning from him about simplicity and the exceptional visual intelligence that White's dyslexia had produced.

Buford explores the lives of the Mexican workers who prepared most of Babbo's food but occupied the kitchen's lowest status. Through Jesus Salgado, he traces the migration chains from Puebla, Mexico, and the informal hiring networks that sustained the restaurant. The story takes a tragic turn when Jesus's cousin Miguel Gonzalez, a gifted prep cook, died by suicide, the circumstances never fully clarified.

Driven by a growing obsession with handmade pasta, Buford traveled to Italy. At Trattoria La Buca in Zibello, near Parma, he ate tortelli di zucca, pillowy ravioli filled with pumpkin and parmigiano, that changed his understanding of pasta. He traces the dish through centuries of Italian food writing, from the 13th-century Liber de coquina to Antonio Latini's 1690s Lo scalco alla moderna, which contained the first egg-based pasta recipe and the first tomato sauce. In Porretta Terme, Betta Valdiserri agreed to instruct him. She guarded her tortellini recipe fiercely, extracting a promise that Buford would not share it with Batali, whom she remembered as "not very good at pasta." Betta taught Buford to knead and roll dough by hand with a matterello (the long Italian rolling pin), using his belly to anchor it. Her formula was one egg per etto (a hundred grams) of flour, with all flavor dependent on egg quality.

Meanwhile, the Babbo kitchen underwent upheaval. Andy, after years of running someone else's kitchen, grew increasingly frustrated about the unrealized promise of his own Spanish restaurant. One by one, nearly every cook departed: Memo for a corporate job, Mark for Italy, Nick Anderer (the pasta cook) for Rome, Holly Burling (hired for her Italian experience) for Florence. Frankie was made executive chef and managed the kitchen through a wholesale staff exodus. Andy finally found a small, cheap venue near Union Square and opened Casa Mono, a Barcelona-inspired market eatery. At a tasting of Andy's first menu, Joe offered a concise verdict: "The cooking is through the fucking roof."

The book's final section follows Buford to Panzano, a Tuscan hill town, where he apprenticed at the butcher shop of Dario Cecchini, widely regarded as the most famous butcher in Italy. Dario was an enormous, Dante-quoting, Mozart-blasting provocateur who ran his macelleria (butcher shop) like an artist's workshop. Buford was tutored by the Maestro, Dario's 62-year-old mentor. He learned to make soppressata (a cured salami) and sausages, and eventually to break down a cow's thigh into cuts with untranslatable Tuscan names. Buford caught fire while stirring a ragù and split his head open on a meat-pounding machine. He also discovered that the meat in the shop was Spanish, shipped from the Costa Brava, because the modern chianina cow, synonymous with Chianti, now tasted of grain and confinement. "It's not the breed," the Maestro explained. "It's the breeding."

Over his months in Panzano, Buford formulates a theory of smallness: The crisis of modern food is not about speed but about scale, about the moment food was treated as a commodity and the producer lost control to the consumer. On his last day, he tried to give the Maestro his knife-sharpening steel as a gift. The Maestro refused: "It goes here, in this drawer, until you return."

In New York, New York Times critic Frank Bruni published a rave review of Babbo, confirming three stars and suggesting it deserved a fourth, withheld only because the music was too loud. The review vindicated Frankie's tenure as executive chef. Over a marathon dinner at Lupa, another of Batali and Bastianich's restaurants, Batali suggested Buford open his own place. Buford declined. He did not want to be a chef, he explains, but "more human." His understanding of Italian cooking extended to the point when Caterina de' Medici crossed the Alps into France. To complete his education, Buford tells Batali, he must follow Caterina. He has to go to France.