My Libby reign of terror continues.
I have finished reading Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (ugh) by Bill Buford, about 50/50 by reading it and by listening to the author read the audio book:
Here’s my review, and here’s a snippet I posted earlier that I liked:
This book annoyed me a whole bunch. The humor didn’t land, the author wasn’t as clever as he thought he was, the main guy he worked under and writes about - Mario Batali - is a sexist pig who had a whole slew of sexual harassment allegations recently, and there’s a whole lot of tangents in here about things I couldn’t really bring myself to care much about about. Things like what Tuscans arbitrarily consider pure or impure, the exact history of how certain dishes left Italy and evolved, or anything involving the Food Network celebrity era.
But, ended up really liking the nitty-gritty “dirty realism” (his phrasing) of his day-to-day in each kitchen, in pasta-making and in butchering. He doesn’t just take the performative and boastful chefs/personalities at their word, he is curious, he digs, gaining an actual understanding of the whys and the hows, diving into the history and the real reason recipes and techniques are the way they are. I found all of this very interesting and well worth the read.
Also appreciated him spending chapters just talking about what is involved in carving up meat, or in creating the perfect length pasta, or in developing a “kitchen awareness” that lets one sense when something needs attention or has finished. All of that was great, and is the kind of thing I was hungry for when looking for writing about the act of cooking.
So I ultimately am glad I read it and think it was a useful read, but didn’t really enjoy reading it much. Another “eating my vegetables” book.
I have promised a friend I would try reading Gideon the Ninth, a series I’ve been curious about, so I’m giving that a go now. It has a lot of the tumblr-ass elements people have complained about, but I think the reader of the audio book crucially gets the immature tone of the character right, so I’m actually largely enjoying it. We’ll see if that keeps up as the story develops!