Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford

Author:Bill Buford [Buford, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Travel, Food, General, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, New York (N.Y.), Cooking, Cooks, Italian, Regional & Ethnic, Cooking; Italian, Restaurants, Autobiography.Food & Travel
ISBN: 9780385662574
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2007-06-26T07:30:02+00:00

MEANWHILE, the polenta was developing a new texture, its third metamorphosis. In the beginning, it had been soupy but thirsty. Then, after an hour, it was shiny and cakey and coming off the sides: for many, an indication the polenta was ready. But by cooking it longer, an hour, even two hours more—stirring it every now and then, adding hot water when needed—you concentrated the flavors. In effect, the polenta was undergoing a modest caramelization by being baked in its own liquid lava—like a self-creating clay oven, drawing out the sweetness in the corn—and its actually being caramelized: along the bottom, a thin crust was forming from the granules browning against the kettle’s hot surface. I scraped it up with my whisk and mixed it in. It was elastic, an elasticity I associate with dough. You also could smell the change. Pasta behaves in a similar way, and you can teach yourself to recognize how it smells when it is ready. Mario describes this as “giving up the gluten” and recalls how, in Italy, walking past open windows at midday, he could register the moment when a lunch was served by the sudden smell of something rich and gluteny, like a perfumed pastry cloud.

I licked some polenta off my knuckles: it tasted good. It was done.

Frankie and I poured the kettle’s contents into metal canisters and put them in a warm bath—a “steam table”—and, just then, Mario appeared. It was six o’clock, and the volunteers, still crushed together on the other side of the invisible boundary, visibly relaxed, except for a now-very-morose Riccardo, who hadn’t budged and managed to be both downcast and erect simultaneously.

There was an hour until service, and there were urgencies. Mario wrote out a schedule and taped it to a wall. (“Seven: Plate coppa. Seven-fifteen: Serve. Seven-thirty: Drop first pasta. Seven-forty: Plate and serve.”) Frankie was concerned about the broken flattop: a canister of butter had been put on it but hadn’t melted.

Mario looked: it was in the wrong place. “The flattop is hot,” he insisted, and spat on it to prove it. (Whoa! Did he just spit on the flattop? I looked: his spittle sizzled.) It was a theatrical gesture—his audience gasped audibly—done, no doubt, because Mario, arriving in a rush, unprepared for the cooking class awaiting him, was suddenly conscious of being onstage. Later, when he dressed the watercress salad, he grabbed a bottle of olive oil and, holding it high above his head, made a flamboyantly streaming arc, like some Alpine guide pouring rotgut from a goatskin boda bag, and his rapt audience, not wanting to miss a thing—even volunteers who had been taking notes stopped their scribbling—held its breath. But spitting on the flattop? It’s true, you don’t normally cook food directly on it, although, at Babbo, the ramps, the pancetta—that’s where they were cooked. It was a brassy thing to do. Maybe it was more difficult being a celebrity chef than any of us understood—the expectation that you felt constantly from the people around you, these strangers, your public, to be so much bigger than a normal human being.

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