About this title: From Bill Buford, one of our most interesting literary figures--eight years as fiction editor at "The New Yorker"--comes a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook. A marvelous hybrid, "Heat" offers a memoir of Buford's kitchen adventure as well as an illuminating exploration of why food ...
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Your search:Books»Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany(159 available copies)
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781400041206ISBN:1400041201
Description: A wonderful copy with some minor edgewear to the cover. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good. read more
Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Book is in good reading condition. Cover has wear at edges and corners. Spine has wear at edges. Dust jacket has some wear. read more
Description: Good. 2006-Hardcover--dj is slightly shelfworn-Used-Good. Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2007-06-26
ISBN-13:9781400034475ISBN:1400034477
Description: Fair. WATER SPILL made some of the pages stiff and wrinkled. No highlighting or underlining. Acceptable reading copy-Read it and pass it on! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9781400034475ISBN:1400034477
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. A few page corners have creases. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 318 p. Vintage. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2006-05-30
ISBN-13:9781400041206ISBN:1400041201
Description: Very Good. Pages are clean, crisp and unmarked. Ex-Library with usual markings. Text is clean and unmarked. Dust jacket shows light wear.; 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed! Free Delivery Confirmation! Ships same or next business day! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 6/26/2007
ISBN-13:9781400034475ISBN:1400034477
Description: Fine. 1400034477 May show signs of shelf wear. Choose EXPEDITED shipping, receive in 2-5 business days. Please email with questions. read more
Edition: First Edition (ARC)
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf
Date Published: 2006-05-30
ISBN-13:9781400041206ISBN:1400041201
Description: Very Good. PAPERBACK ADVANCE COPY (ARC/GALLEY/PROOF). Front cover scuffed and curled. Minor shelf wear; corners crisp; uncreased spine. read more
Description: Fine. Collectible 1st Vintage Edition (2006 pbk), 1st printing with 10 full numberline. Excellent condition. No writings/underlines/highlights. Pages are nice and clean. Minor shelfwear. Free deliver confirmation! Satisfaction guaranteed! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2007-06-26
ISBN-13:9781400034475ISBN:1400034477
Description: Like New. Like new softcover in excellent condition, no writing, non-smoking home, clean text, binding tight, Christian business. read more
"I'm a bit of a foodie and put myself through university waiting tables in a fairly upscale, (if not Italian) restaurant so I was quite interested in reading about Bill Buford's take on the industry which is practically a sub culture all its own. I found his experiences as a neophyte working at Babbo very entertaining. His inside view of the world of celebrity cooks and kitchen politics was also quite interesting and often very funny as well.
A little over half way through however, my interest began to wane. All perspective seemed to go out the window once he decided to go back to Italy a second time to apprentice himself to a butcher. At this point the book is no longer an overview of cooks and cooking but a self absorbed meditation on food where the pursuit of tiny snippets of information (like the exact moment that eggs were first added to pasta) are treated as if they just might be the holy grail of Italian cooking and the pursuit of them can sprawl on for pages."
"Let me preface this review with a disclaimer, I am not a foodie; I am an eater. My only interest in food typically is how it tastes, not its journey from field to slaughterhouse to restaurant to the particulars of preparation to my plate to my stomach, but Buford might have changed my perspective. His literary-historical perspective on Tuscan food, his wild, uproarious tales from the life of Mario Batali and the Babbo kitchen, and his engaging portraits of food culture in Italia, were thoroughly enjoyable and a most entertaining read. The only quibbles I have are the barely mentioned supporting cast of his family that was also involved in his big, culinary tour of la dolce vita. While I have always fantasized about marrying a man who would suggest that I quit academia to move to Italy and live on pancetta and love, I think it must have been horrifying for his wife to hear that her husband was abandoning the relative stability and paycheck of his job as fiction editor for *The New Yorker* to spend time screwing around in Mario Batali's kitchen and then the restaurants and butcheries of Tuscany trying to sate his gluttinous muse. Buford's acknowledgment at the beginning of the book hardly seems a fittingly sufficient tribute to the amount of dedication and forbearance displayed by such a spouse. Nonetheless, this was obvi. a Perrin pick, and she was right-on in thinking it would be just the fantasy food tour of Italy my graduate-education-weary soul needed at the moment."
"Overall an engaging and interesting read about one man's journey from amateur home cooking through the world of a three-star restaurant kitchen. It's also a musing of sorts on food in general as he weaves in his own take on the slow food movement and brings up culinary history a bit (e.g., the history of the egg in pasta). Lastly it's a travelogue/memoir. In spite of it taking on a lot of different styles, I found it to be well paced, contain very interesting characters, and possess a storyline that kept me wanting to read (and eat) more.
I had two gripes. The first was his frequent use of the phrase "in the event" instead of "in the end" or "after all was said and done." It's stylistic, but I found it pretentious to the point of making my teeth grind. The worse flaw however was the journalist's typical sin...selling out your sources for a good story. I don't want to give anything away, but his treatment of two of the major characters in the book, Batali and Dario included a few too many cheap shots for my liking. I think he was trying to give an "objective" view of these guys who play dominant roles in the book, but they sometimes came off as petty slights in a wink-wink way with the reader (e.g., the repeated "Aha! This sounds French to me!" tack in regards to Mario, who apparently hates the French style of cooking).
That said, those were small issues and didn't detract much. It's a great read and I went to bed hungry every night with the many vivid accounts of what must have been delicious Italian food. It definitely made me want to travel to Italy for an extended period of time and eat as much as possible."
"I loved this book a whole lot - and warn that should you tackle it, please do so with a large amount of red wine and italian food readily available. Much like it's torture to watch Chocolat without chocolate, it would be rude not to eat pasta and drink red wine while this book's in your life.
The book's an amalgamation of many things I love - cooking, peeking behind the scenes at famous restaurants, drinking wine, contemplating where food does and should come from. Buford spent just over a year slowly learning skills in Mario Batali's kitchen, and his memoir of those months is interspersed by historical wanderings - when did eggs come to replace water in preparing pasta dough? Who wrote the first definitive Italian cookbook? Did Catherine de Medici really create French cuisine when she moved to France, betrothed to a Prince? There's even a little philosophizing on offer, a la Pollan and Bittman - it's not fast food or slow food that's the issue, Buford argues, it's big food and little food that matters:
Italians have a word, casalinga, homemade, although its primary sense is "made by hand." My theory is just a variant of casalinga. (Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant.)
I loved the behind-the-scenes details of what goes on in the kitchen of a good restaurant, and the historical diversions, and the quotes from centuries-old textbooks. Buford delivers all of it with a good sense of humor, especially when reflecting on his own mistakes, and the whole thing is fascinating and entertaining to a really remarkable degree. Yay book!"
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