Heat charts Bill Buford’s journey into the stomach of Italy: former fiction editor for the New Yorker*, he gave up his steady job to slave in the kitchen of Mario Batali’s Babbo, then go to Italy and learn pasta-making and later Tuscan buchery from Dario Cecchini. Buford seems very serious and dedicated about all of this, and shares not only his kitchen stories but also original historical research. When was fresh pasta first made with egg? Is Italian cooking the basis for French cooking, or is it the other way around - alla just a copy of a la? These narratives are fascinating if you’re insane about Italian cuisine, like me, and probably deadly dull if you’re indifferent. Buford’s a strong, mindful writer, and I’d like to think that you could pick up Heat and be drawn into it with starting with only an average amount of interest. The only thing that weirded me out was that Buford spent some time with Marco Pierre White, the terrifyingly good British chef who trained Gordon Ramsey, but no mention of Ramsey is made. I would have ascribed this to textual focus, except that the third section opens with a Ramsey quote! White and Ramsey have an amazing relationship, which you can catch a glimpse of when they go fishing together in the BBC’s Boiling Point documentary. Anyway, here’s one of my favorite passages:

If you’re a boy, your principal difficulty in making tortellini, I discovered, is your fingers, which, alas, really need to be a girl’s, and not just any girl’s, but an elfin girl’s.
Your fingers need to be small because all the action occurs on the top of the smallest one, the pinky - in Betta’s case, the tiny top of her very petite pinky - where you place the puniest square of pasta. You then pack the puny square with the largest amount of filling possible and fold it, corner to corner, to form a miniature but bulging triangle. You next tip the top part of of the triangle forward, as though it were bowing in an expression of gratitude, and then (the crucial step) pull the other two corners forward, as though securing the bowing head in a headlock. You then press it all together to form a ring. When you turn the pasta over, you’ll be astonished by what you created: a belly button. What can I say? It’s wildly erotic.

*Also a founding editor of Granta and the publisher of Granta Books - I’m thinking he was responsible for approving Claire Messud’s debut novel When The World Was Steady.