Heat

Bill Buford, an editor at the New Yorker, became so enthralled with Mario Batali that he left his job to work for free in the kitchen at Babbo. After working his way up from the prep kitchen to the pasta station he feels he has to look further afield to discover its secrets; and shuttles between New York and Italy to learn the foundations of Italian cooking in the tiny rural kitchens where Batali honed his art. It takes a heaping pile of tenacity topped with considerable masochism to temporarily put aside a successful career to perform such physically punishing, financially unrewarding work; and it's sometimes unclear why exactly he put himself (and his wife) through the ordeal. But Buford wisely avoids the cooking - as-vehicle-of-self-discovery theme; and focuses on the economics and mechanics of running a great restaurant, and the fundamental elements of great Italian food. Even Batali, while the subject of a few slightly man-crushy chapters in the beginning, turns out to be just one of the many complicated, passionate characters who get the food from farm to table. I forgot all about him when I got to the section about Buford's apprenticeship with Dario, the Tuscan butcher who indignantly empties bottles of nonlocal balsamic vinegar on restaurant floors. Reading "Heat" will make you hungry- no big deal, any food-porn type book can do that. But more than any book in the genre I'd ever read, it will make you profoundly grateful for the people who cook for you.