Carol's review
rating:
recommended for: No one.
When I first started this book, I asked my friend Jen what she thought of it. Not much, apparently; she didn't find the author "compelling". It was just boring, even for an amateur cook like me. He describes things (like when egg was first introduced as an ingredient in pasta) that he says most people would not be interested in, and then goes on and on ad nauseum about them. If you know they are not interesting to people, then why go into detail about them? It is odd that he was an editor for The New Yorker. He seemed to use the same words over and over. I thought "evanescent" must be his new favorite word since he used it to describe everyone and everything. It also occurred to me that he wasn't a very likable person, either. It was clear that he enjoyed starting trouble. He didn't seem to have any loyalty to the chefs who were teaching him. He told Dario's secrets about where he obtained his meat to Dario's arch enemy, for example. The book is full of ...more
When I first started this book, I asked my friend Jen what she thought of it. Not much, apparently; she didn't find the author "compelling". It was just boring, even for an amateur cook like me. He describes things (like when egg was first introduced as an ingredient in pasta) that he says most people would not be interested in, and then goes on and on ad nauseum about them. If you know they are not interesting to people, then why go into detail about them? It is odd that he was an editor for The New Yorker. He seemed to use the same words over and over. I thought "evanescent" must be his new favorite word since he used it to describe everyone and everything. It also occurred to me that he wasn't a very likable person, either. It was clear that he enjoyed starting trouble. He didn't seem to have any loyalty to the chefs who were teaching him. He told Dario's secrets about where he obtained his meat to Dario's arch enemy, for example. The book is full of gossip about his teachers, including Mario Batali, and he also makes sure to attribute it to someone else ... (I'm just sayin'...). He was pretty impressed with himself and the obscure facts he could find out about gastronomy. I agree with him that most people don't want to know about how their hamburger came to be; I certainly don't. And maybe we should take some responsibility for what we eat. However, his description of butchering and detailed passages about the uses of what most people would consider the inedible parts of an animal were enough to turn me away from steak forever and possibly turn me into a vegetarian! At the end of the book, it sounds as if Batali and he are still friends but I wonder if that changed once Batali read it. Certainly, it is no news that Batali is a wild man and a hard partier; however, I felt the author's representation of him was small and mean-spirited, especially considering that a kitchen on the level of Babbo would, as he himself admitted, never take on a home chef without formal kitchen education or experience. The author is an ingrate, and I found him (and subsequently his book) distasteful. He moves his wife all over the world with disregard for her job(she's an editor-in-chief of a major magazine in New York, I believe) on his whim. He ends the book with the fact that Mario offered him a restaurant (and of course getting in that now he knew stuff Mario didn't know) but that he was now going to go to France! Great advertisement for a sequel, wouldn't you say? ...less
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany