Overview

From one of our most interesting literary figures - former editor of Granta, former fiction editor at The New Yorker, acclaimed author of Among the Thugs - a sharp, funny, exuberant, close-up account of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook. Expanding on his James Beard Award-winning New Yorker article, Bill Buford gives us a richly evocative chronicle of his experience as slave to Mario Batali in the kitchen of Batali's three-star New York restaurant, Babbo. In a fast-paced, candid narrative, Buford describes three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, as he worked his way up the Babbo ladder from kitchen bitch to line cook . . . his relationship with the larger-than-life Batali, whose story he learns as their friendship grows through (and sometimes despite) kitchen encounters and after-work all-nighters . . . and his immersion in the arts of butchery in Northern Italy, of preparing game in London, and making handmade pasta at an Italian hillside trattoria. Heat is a marvelous hybrid: a memoir of Buford's kitchen adventure, the story of Batali's amazing rise to culinary (and extra-culinary) fame, a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at a famous restaurant, and an illuminating exploration of why food matters. It is a book to delight in, and to savour. From the Hardcover edition.

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9781415907894

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A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2006<br>A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2006<br><br> Sharing Buford's table talk is a pleasure not to be passed up. -- Michael Redhill, The Globe and Mail<br> <br> Heat is a book about obsession, written by a man in the grip of one. It is fuelled by food, but food is not its only subject -- love, sex, comradeship, terror and pain are all part of the story too. -- The Telegraph <br><br> A dazzling and funny account of two magnificently mad years. -- The Guardian <br><br> [Buford] excels at vibrantly colourful descriptive writing. . . . What shines through is the story of Bill Buford falling in love with food, and his passionate journey of learning. -- Vancouver Sun<br><br> it is clear that Buford can hold his own with anyone in the foodie pedantry stakes.... Heat is a subtle, expletive-heavy, genuine account of a writer's engagement with food.... [an] ultimately nourishing book. -- Times Literary Supplement <br><br> A messy, brilliant book, a high-brow kitchen soap opera, which never skates over the characters' flaws but is suffused with an infectious love of food and the people who devote their lives to it. -- The Telegraph (UK)<br><br> An incisive, cracklingly funny book. -- Time (Canada)<br><br> Heat , tightly written, evocative and compelling, is a feast in its own right. -- Edmonton Journal<br><br> A difficult book to put down -- if Heat was a movie, you'd be viewing it from behind your fingers. The book is an intoxicating drug we can't get enough of in paragraph after breathless paragraph of fast-paced and candid prose that leaves both the writer and the reader humbled. . . . And when one reluctantly turns the last page on Heat , it is with a sadness and a hungering for more. -- Toronto Sun <br><br><br> From the Hardcover edition.

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