Blog Joyent

Pepperiness

As long as Martha Stewart and that bam guy aren’t involved, I’ll watch pretty much any cooking show, and, to the irritation of my girlfriend, who has a steel trap memory and can’t be bothered to sit through anything more than once, I’ll watch pretty much any cooking show again and again until whatever method or recipe is shoehorned in nice and tight. Then I’ll rush to the store, find half the required ingredients and improvise the rest, cook, eat, conclude that it didn’t go all that well, and then never make the same thing again.

I’m just as compulsive with books about food (as opposed to cookbooks; recipes are lame documentation), albeit with less of the Must Make That Now urge. Elizabeth David, Margaret Visser, MFK Fisher: love them all, and the current size of my gut is a pretty good indication I should get back to reading something a little less decadent. Or something. Anyway. Here’s a strong strong recommendation for this Summer’s Heat, by Granta founding editor Bill Buford. Through the careful, gentlemanly prose you’d expect from someone who’s edited basically every significant writer of the past twenty years, the book serves up (shaddup) three interlocked narratives: about working from the bottom up in a cramped and hot New York restaurant kitchen while the celebrity chef/owner gabbles about out in the dining room; about the overwhelming desire of celebrity chef/owners to criticise and insult the competition to its face; and also about Buford’s own pilgrimages to spend months and even years learning at the side of various masters: of pasta, of polenta, of meat.

The meat passage, in which Buford spends a long and gruelling time with a larger than life Italian butcher, is I suppose the best and most memorable part of the book. Interesting also to note that the American edition, unlike its UK counterpart, refers rather preciously in its subtitle to the Tuscan with whom Buford apprentices as ‘Dante-Quoting’. On the British jacket he’s merely a ‘Butcher’, the Dante namecheck being a tad twee for them, one surmises. Thing is, apparently Dario Cecchini does quote Dante quite a lot, such as on the Sunday morning when Buford first shows up to learn the craft: he walks in to find the place packed, Mozart blaring out of the shop stereo, people sloshing glasses of red wine and cramming their faces full of white foam (raw pork fat) on bread, while the enormous Cecchini stands above them, calling out greatest-hit cantos from The Divine Comedy.

It’s after a lot of contemplation about muscle and sinew you are provided with one of the few intact ‘recipes’ for a single dish in the book. Simplicity itself: put a shank of beef in a dutch oven with a bottle of wine, salt, and a small mountain (okay, four heaping tablespoons) of fresh ground black pepper, and put it in a low oven for TWELVE HOURS (it’s worth repeating that, in the book anyway, and pardon my Italian, this is officially referred to as ‘cooking the shit out of the fucker’). Dish it up with some crusty bread, a glass of wine, and wait for the peppery tears to flow. Just had it at lunch, and I’m telling you that’s some good stew. May actually cook it again.