{"product_id":"heat-isbn-9781400034475","title":"Heat","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe book that helped define a genre: \u003ci\u003eHeat\u003c\/i\u003e is a beloved culinary classic, an adventure in the kitchen and into Italian cuisine, by Bill Buford, author of \u003ci\u003eDirt\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBill Buford was a highly acclaimed writer and editor at the\u003ci\u003e New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e when he decided to leave for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, one of New York City’s most popular and revolutionary Italian restaurants.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinally realizing  a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford  soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water  on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels  him further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making  and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details  the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing  and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor. The result is a hilarious, self-deprecating, and fantasically entertaining journey into the heart of the Italian kitchen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Buford develops a superbly detailed picture of life in a top restaurant kitchen. . . \u003ci\u003eHeat\u003c\/i\u003e is a sumptuous meal.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A delicious history of Italian cooking, with a twist: Buford, an amateur cook, entered the kitchen of one of New York City’s hottest restaurants as a full-time employee, and [gives] us a story of Italian cuisine through the many characters . . . who prepare it, serve it, and eat it.” —\u003ci\u003eGQ\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Delightful. . . . Charming. . . . [Buford’s] style is . . . happily obsessed with a weird subculture, woozily in love with both cooking and the foul-mouthed, refined-palette world of the chef.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Exuberant, hilarious, glorying in its rich and arcane subject matter, \u003ci\u003eHeat\u003c\/i\u003e is Plimptonesque immersion journalism. . . . With \u003ci\u003eHeat\u003c\/i\u003e, we have a writer lighting on the subject of a lifetime.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eBill Buford\u003c\/b\u003e is a Staff Writer and European Correspondent for \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e. He was the Fiction Editor of the magazine for eight years, from April 1995 to December 2002. Before that he edited \u003ci\u003eGranta\u003c\/i\u003e magazine for sixteen years and, in 1989, became the publisher of Granta Books. He has edited three anthologies: \u003ci\u003eThe Best of Granta Travel\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Best of Granta Reportage\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Granta Book of the Family\u003c\/i\u003e.  Bill is also the author of \u003ci\u003eAmong the Thugs\u003c\/i\u003e (Norton, 1992), a highly personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism. For \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker,\u003c\/i\u003e he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali.  Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1954, Bill Buford grew up in California and was educated at the University of California at Berkeley and at Kings College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for his work on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jessica Green, and their two sons.\u003ca name=\"iti1\"\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003cb\u003eLinguine with Clams\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIf you're tempted to make linguine with clams according to the kitchen's preparation, you should understand that the only ingredient that's measured is the pasta. (A serving is four ounces.) Everything else is what you pick up with your fingertips, and it's either a small pinch or a large pinch or something in between: not helpful, but that, alas, is the way quantities are determined in a restaurant.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe downside of measuring by hand is what happens to the hands. At the end of an evening your fingertips are irretrievably stained with some very heady aromatics, and there's nothing you can do to eliminate them. You wash your hands. You soak them. You shower, you scrub them again. The next day, they still stink of onion, garlic, and pork fat, and, convinced that everyone around you is picking up the smell, you ram them into your pockets, maniacally rubbing your fingers against each other like an obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eIngredients\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e small pinch of chopped garlic\u003cbr\u003esmall pinch of chili flakes\u003cbr\u003emedium pinch of chopped onion\u003cbr\u003emedium pinch of pancetta\u003cbr\u003eolive oil\u003cbr\u003ebutter\u003cbr\u003ewhite wine\u003cbr\u003e4 oz. linguine per serving\u003cbr\u003eA big handful of clams\u003cbr\u003eparsley  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNOTE: the ingredients and preparations in this recipe are approximate—experiment with proportions to make it to your taste.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBegin by roasting small pinches of garlic and chili flakes and medium pinches of the onion and pancetta in a hot pan with olive oil. Hot oil accelerates the cooking process,and the moment everything gets soft you pour it away (holding back the contents with your tongs) and add a slap of butter and a splash of white wine, which stops the cooking. This is Stage One—and you are left with the familiar messy buttery mush—but already you've added two things you'd never see in Italy: butter (seafood with butter—or any other dairy ingredient—verges on culinary blasphemy) and pancetta, because, according to Mario, pork and shellfish are an eternal combination found in many other places: in Portugal, in amêijoas na cataplana (clams and ham); or in Spain, in a paella (chorizo and scallops); or in the United States, in the Italian-American clams casino, even though none of those places happens to be in Italy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Stage Two, you drop the pasta in boiling water and take your messy buttery pan and fill it with a big handful of clams and put it on the highest possible flame. The objective is to cook them fast—they'll start opening after three or four minutes, when you give the pan a swirl, mixing the shellfish juice with the buttery porky white wine emulsion. At six minutes and thirty seconds, you use your tongs to pull your noodles out and drop them into your pan—all that starchy pasta water slopping in with them is still a good thing; give the pan another swirl; flip it; swirl it again to ensure that the pasta is covered by the sauce. If it looks dry, add another splash of pasta water; if too wet, pour some out. You then let the thing cook away for another half minute or so, swirling, swirling, until the sauce streaks across the bottom of the pan, splash it with olive oil and sprinkle it with parsley: dinner.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first glimpse I had of what Mario Batali’s friends had described to me  as the  “myth of Mario” was on a cold Saturday night in January 2002, when  I invited him  to a birthday dinner. Batali, the chef and co-owner of  Babbo, an Italian restaurant  in Manhattan, is such a famous and proficient  cook that he’s rarely invited to people’s  homes for a meal, he told me,  and he went out of his way to be a grateful guest.  He arrived bearing his  own quince-flavored grappa (the rough, distilled end-of-harvest  grape  juices rendered almost drinkable by the addition of the fruit); a jar of   homemade nocino (same principle, but with walnuts); an armful of wine; and  a white,  dense slab of lardo—literally, the raw “lardy” back of a very fat  pig, one he’d  cured himself with herbs and salt. I was what might  generously be described as an  enthusiastic cook, more confident than  competent (that is, keen but fundamentally  clueless), and to this day I am  astonished that I had the nerve to ask over someone  of Batali’s  reputation, along with six guests who thought they’d have an amusing   evening witnessing my humiliation. (Mario was a friend of the birthday  friend,  so I’d thought—why not invite him, too?—but when, wonder of  wonders, he then accepted  and I told my wife, Jessica, she was apoplectic  with wonder: “What in the world  were you thinking of, inviting a famous  chef to our apartment for dinner? Now what  are we going to do?”)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the event, there was little comedy, mainly because  Mario didn’t give me  a chance. Shortly after my being instructed that only a moron  would let  his meat rest by wrapping it in foil after cooking it, I cheerfully gave   up and let Batali tell me what to do. By then he’d taken over the evening,  anyway.  Not long into it, he’d cut the lardo into thin slices and, with a  startling flourish  of intimacy, laid them individually on our tongues,  whispering that we needed to  let the fat melt in our mouths to appreciate  its intensity. The lardo was from a  pig that, in the last months of its  seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound life, had lived  on apples, walnuts, and  cream (“The best song sung in the key of pig”), and Mario  convinced us  that, as the fat dissolved, we’d detect the flavors of the animal’s  happy  diet—there, in the back of the mouth. No one that evening had knowingly  eaten  pure fat before (“At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it  prosciutto bianco”),  and by the time Mario had persuaded us to a third  helping everyone’s heart was racing.  Batali was an impressively dedicated  drinker—he mentioned in passing that, on trips  to Italy made with his  Babbo co-owner, Joe Bastianich, the two of them had been  known to put away  a case of wine during an evening meal—and while I don’t think  that any of  us drank anything like that, we were, by now, very thirsty (the lardo,  the  salt, the human heat of so much jollity) and, cheered on, found ourselves  knocking  back more and more. I don’t know. I don’t really remember. There  were also the grappa  and the nocino, and one of my last images is of  Batali at three in the morning—a  stoutly round man with his back  dangerously arched, his eyes closed, a long red  ponytail swinging  rhythmically behind him, an unlit cigarette dangling from his  mouth, his  red Converse high-tops pounding the floor—playing air guitar to Neil   Young’s “Southern Man.” Batali was forty-one, and I remember thinking it  had been  a long time since I’d seen a grown man play air guitar. He then  found the soundtrack  for Buena Vista Social Club, tried to salsa with one  of the women guests (who promptly  fell over a sofa), moved on to her  boyfriend, who was unresponsive, put on a Tom  Waits CD instead, and sang  along as he washed the dishes and swept the floor. He  reminded me of an  arrangement we’d made for the next day—when I’d invited Batali  to dinner,  he’d reciprocated by asking me to join him at a New York Giants football   game, tickets courtesy of the commissioner of the NFL, who had just eaten  at Babbo—and  then disappeared with three of my friends, assuring them  that, with his back-of-the-hand  knowledge of downtown establishments open  until five, he’d find a place to continue  the evening. They ended up at  Marylou’s in the Village—in Batali’s description,  “A wise guy joint where  you can get anything at any time of night, and none of it  good.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was daylight when Batali got home. I learned this from his building   superintendent the next morning, as the two of us tried to get Batali to  wake up—the  commissioner’s driver was waiting outside. When Batali finally  appeared, forty-five  minutes later, he was momentarily perplexed, standing  in the doorway of his apartment  in his underwear and wondering why I was  there, too. (Batali has a remarkable girth,  and it was startling to see  him clad so.) Then, in minutes, he transformed himself  into what I would  come to know as the Batali look: the shorts, the clogs, the wraparound   sunglasses, the red hair pulled back into its ponytail. One moment, a  rotund Clark  Kent in his underpants; the next, “Molto Mario”—the clever,  many-layered name of  his cooking television program, which, in one of its  senses, literally means Very  Mario (that is, an intensified Mario, an  exaggerated Mario)—and a figure whose renown  I didn’t appreciate until, as  guests of the commissioner, we were allowed onto the  field before the  game. Fans of the New York Giants are so famously brutish as to  be  cartoons (bare-chested on a wintry morning or wearing hard hats; in any  case,  not guys putting in their domestic duty in the kitchen), and I was  surprised by  how many recognized the ponytailed chef, who stood facing  them, arms crossed over  his   chest, beaming. “Hey, Molto!” they shouted. “What’s cooking, Mario?”  “Mario,  make me a pasta!” At the time, Molto Mario was shown on afternoons  on cable television,  and I found a complex picture of the working  metropolitan male emerging, one rushing  home the moment his shift ended to  catch lessons in braising his broccoli rabe and  getting just the right  forked texture on his homemade orecchiette. I stood back  with one of the  security people, taking in the spectacle (by now members of the  crowd were  chanting “Molto, Molto, Molto”)—this very round man, whose manner and   dress said, “Dude, where’s the party?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I love this guy,” the security man  said. “Just lookin’ at him makes me  hungry.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Mario Batali is the most recognized  chef in a city with more chefs than  any other city in the world. In addition to  Batali’s television show—and  his appearances promoting, say, the NASCAR race track  in Delaware—he was  simply and energetically omnipresent. It would be safe to say  that no New  York chef ate more, drank more, and was out and about as much. If you  live  in New York City, you will see him eventually (sooner, if your evenings  get  going around two in the morning). With his partner, Joe, Batali also  owned two other  restaurants, Esca and Lupa, and a shop selling Italian  wine, and, when we met, they  were talking about opening a pizzeria and  buying a vineyard in Tuscany. But Babbo  was the heart of their enterprise,  crushed into what was originally a nineteenth-century  coach house, just  off Washington Square, in Greenwich Village. The building was  narrow; the  space was crowded, jostly, and loud; and the food, studiously Italian,   rather than Italian-American, was characterized by an over-the-top  flourish that  seemed to be expressly Batali’s. People went there in the  expectation of excess.  Sometimes I wondered if Batali was less a  conventional cook than an advocate of  a murkier enterprise of stimulating  outrageous appetites (whatever they might be)  and satisfying them  intensely (by whatever means). A friend of mine, who’d once  dropped by the  bar for a drink and was then fed personally by Batali for the next  six  hours, went on a diet of soft fruit and water for three days. “This guy  knows  no middle ground. It’s just excess on a level I’ve never known  before—it’s food  and drink, food and drink, food and drink, until you feel  you’re on drugs.” Chefs  who were regular visitors were subjected to  extreme versions of what was already  an extreme experience. “We’re going  to kill him,” Batali said to me with maniacal  glee as he prepared a meal  for a rival who had innocently ordered a seven-course  tasting menu, to  which Batali added a lethal number of extra courses. The starters  (all  variations in pig) included lonza (the cured backstrap from the  cream-apple-and-walnut  herd), coppa (from the shoulder), a fried foot, a  porcini mushroom roasted with  Batali’s own pancetta (the belly), plus  (“for the hell of it”) a pasta topped with  guanciale (the jowls). This  year, Mario was trying out a new motto: “Wretched excess  is just barely  enough.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Batali was born in 1960 and grew up outside Seattle:  a suburban kid with a  solid Leave It to Beaver upbringing. His mother, Marilyn,  is En-glish and  French Canadian—from her comes her son’s flaming red hair and a  fair,  un-Italian complexion. The Italian is from his father, Armandino, the  grandson  of immigrants who arrived in the 1890s. When Mario was growing  up, his father was  a well-paid Boeing executive in charge of procuring  airplane parts made overseas,  and in   1975, after being posted to Europe, to supervise the manufacturing  close-up,  he moved his family to Spain. That, according to Gina, Mario’s  youngest sibling,  was when Mario changed. (“He was already pushing the  limits.”) Madrid, in the post-Franco  years (bars with no minimum age, hash  hangouts, the world’s oldest profession suddenly  legalized), was a place  of exhilarating license, and Mario seems to have experienced  a little bit  of everything on offer. He was caught growing marijuana on the roof  of his  father’s apartment building (the first incident of what would become a  theme—Batali  was later expelled from his dorm in college, suspected of  dealing, and, later still,  there was some trouble in Tijuana that actually  landed him in jail). The marijuana  association also evokes a memory of the  first meals Batali remembers preparing,  late-night panini with caramelized  locally grown onions, a local cow’s-milk Spanish  cheese, and paper-thin  slices of chorizo: “The best stoner munch you can imagine;  me and my  younger brother Dana were just classic stoner kids—we were so happy.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e By the time Batali returned to the United States in 1978 to attend Rutgers   University, in New Jersey, he was determined to get back to Europe (“I  wanted to  be a Spanish banker—I loved the idea of making a lot of money  and living a luxurious  life in Madrid”), and his unlikely double major was  in business management and Spanish  theatre. But after being thrown out of  his dorm, Batali got work as a dishwasher  at a pizzeria called Stuff Yer  Face (in its name alone, destiny was calling), and  his life changed. He  was promoted to cook, then line cook (working at one “station”  in a “line”  of stations, making one thing), and then asked to be manager, an offer  he  turned down. He didn’t want the responsibility; he was having too good a  time.  The life at Stuff Yer Face was fast (twenty-five years later, he  still claims he  has the record for the most pizzas made in an hour), sexy  (“The most booooootiful  waitresses in town”), and very buzzy (“I don’t  want to come off as a big druggy,  but when a guy comes into the kitchen  with a pizza pan turned upside down, covered  with lines of crack, how can  you say no?”). When, in his junior year, he attended  a career conference  hosted by representatives from major corporations, Batali realized  he had  been wrong; he was never going to be a banker. He was going to be a chef.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “My mother and grandmother had always told me that I should be a cook. In  fact,  when I was preparing my applications for college, my mother had  suggested cooking  school. But I said, ‘Ma, that’s too gay. I don’t want to  go to cooking school—that’s  for fags.’ ” Five years later, Batali was back  in Europe, attending the Cordon Bleu  in London.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e His father, still overseeing Boeing’s foreign operations, was now  based in  England. Gina Batali was there, too, and recalls seeing her eldest brother   only when she was getting ready for school and he was returning from his  all-night  escapades after attending classes during the day and then  working at a pub. The  pub was the Six Bells, on the King’s Road in  Chelsea. Mario had been bartending  at the so-called American bar (“No idea  what I was doing”), when a high-priced dining  room opened in the back and  a chef was hired to run it, a Yorkshire man named Marco  Pierre White.  Batali, bored by the pace of cooking school, was hired to be the new   chef’s slave.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Today, Marco Pierre White is regarded as one of the most influential  chefs  in Britain (as well as the most foul-tempered, most mercurial, and most  bullying),  and it’s an extraordinary fortuity that these two men, both in  their early twenties,  found themselves in a tiny pub kitchen together.  Batali didn’t understand what he  was witnessing: his restaurant experience  had been making strombolis in New Brunswick.  “I assumed I was seeing what  everyone else already knew. I didn’t feel like I was  on the cusp of a  revolution. And yet, while I had no idea this guy was about to  become so  famous, I could see he was preparing food from outside the box. He was  a  genius on the plate. I’d never worked on presentation. I just put shit on  the  plate.” He described White’s making a deep green puree from basil  leaves and then  a white butter sauce, then swirling the green sauce in one  direction, and the white  sauce in the other, and drawing a swerving line  down the middle of the plate. “I  had never seen anyone draw fucking lines  with two sauces.” White would order Batali  to follow him to market (“I was  his whipping boy—’Yes, master,’ I’d answer, ‘whatever  you say, master’ ”)  and they’d return with game birds or ingredients for some of  the most  improbable dishes ever to be served in an English pub: écrevisses in a   reduced lobster sauce,   oysters with caviar, roasted ortolan (a rare, tiny bird  served virtually  breathing, gulped down, innards and all, like a raw crustacean)—“the  whole  menu written out in fucking French.”","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302632935653,"sku":"NP9781400034475","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400034475.jpg?v=1767728853","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/heat-isbn-9781400034475","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}