Food for Thought: Bill Buford’s Dirt

Bill Buford is a lucky guy. He loves to cook and is good at it. But his true talent is persuading world class chefs to take him under their wing—as a student, a stagiare, a baker. He does the job well and puts up with long hours without complaint and also without pay—it is even possible (and certainly true in the case of the school, which charged three thousand euros for a short course in cooking fish) he pays out of his own pocket for the privilege. In the 1990s he did this in the kitchens of Mario Batali in New York and the result was Heat, our favorite cooking book of all time.

Bill Buford’s Dirt is just as good, though a bit less focused. At the end of Heat we left him in Tuscany, learning traditional butchery from the great Dario Ceccini, who became a tourist attraction with his own restaurant in part through Buford’s accolades. Now back in the U.S., Buford decides to finish the job and move to Italy and learn how to produce fine cuisine from the ground up. The problem is, every chef he talks to says he must go to France, not Italy, if he wants to learn to cook and specifically to Lyon, a gritty industrial city which is also the capital of French cuisine. And so he does, planning to stay one year but living there for five.

Bill Buford’s Dirt follows his adventures through the cooking school, then as apprentice to the local baker, then—the longest and most interesting section of the book—as stagiare at La Mere Brazier, a Michelin-starred restaurant. The kitchen is full of characters who delight in abusing this peculiar American writer, and Buford likes it so much he negotiates to stay on far longer than the 17 days he originally asked for.

Bill Buford’s Dirt is full of tips and trucs—if you want to taste from a firehose of food nerdishness pick up the book in a book shop and turn to p. 255, where he is making Bearnaise, or p. 300 when he and Michel Richard (the father of nouvelle cuisine) are on a train riffing about their various food experiences. There is also some wonkiness—Buford cannot let go his love of Italian cooking and becomes increasingly convinced that the French cuisine came from Italy, a claim which is derided by his French hosts who of course hate Italians. This only makes him dig deeper, reading historical cookbooks in the old languages and walking the route over the Alps by which Catherine de Medici allegedly brought her personal chef to Lyon in 1533.

If you have read Heat, then you know you have to read Dirt. (If you have not yet read Heat, you have two great feasts ahead of you so get that first.) Check it out.