Heat Bill Buford Doubleday ISBN 0385662564 hardcover, 336 pages $33 (CDN)

Heat is Bill Buford’s account of his trial by fire (literally) as a line-chef-in-training at Babbo, the New York restaurant of chef Mario Batali. Many adjectives could be used to describe Batali: successful, famed, egotistical and notorious, are just a few that come to mind. Bill Buford is well-laurelled too, but for his literary rather than his culinary achievements; founder (or more accurately, resuscitator) of Granta magazine, which he edited from 1979 until leaving England in 1995 for the plum position of fiction editor at The New Yorker (during the tenure of editor Tina Brown).

For some, reading about food can be almost as enjoyable as eating. With writing as with eating, quality wins out over quantity every time. Better a simple dish prepared with passion and skill, than a pretentious entrée at an overrated three-star restaurant frequented mainly by the business-travelling, expense-account crowd; and better a single paragraph which perfectly captures a peak dining moment, than an exhaustively researched (but exhausting) tract on olive oil or salt.

Heat is not in the “exhaustively researched (but exhausting)” category; but neither is it an example of inspired food writing. Buford’s abrupt detour from the literary life into the kitchen of a professional restaurant — and further — is his response to the standard mid-life crisis of a type-A male: he feels age coming on and is overwhelmed by “a feeling that […] I would never have this opportunity again.” Buford writes well: the sentences are rhythmic and strung together in a way that pulls you through the story — but the style is closer to journalism than poetry, while the best food writing tilts the other way, with the result being a literature which feeds the intellect, the emotions, and — ultimately, by inspiring us to action — the belly.

M. F. K. Fisher’s books are my personal benchmark for writing about food, but she sets a standard which is difficult to match (and Heat does not come close). Heat (presumably a reference to the saying “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen”) celebrates gonzo cooking (although not quite as gonzo as Anthony Bourdain in his Kitchen Confidential) — as if Buford felt the need to prove that the kitchen is not a woman’s domain. Take Buford’s loving description of a sliced knuckle as an example, the bandages ineffective at stemming the generous flow of his blood, the rubber glove plumping and threatening to contribute its carmine cargo suddenly into the four-quart pan among the sautéeing celery and diced carrots.

Part way through Heat I realized that it was unfair to compare Buford to M. F. K. Fisher, and that a more accurate comparison would be with George Plimpton’s accounts of his experiences as a “professional amateur” in various sports back in the 1960s. But Heat makes me miss George Plimpton, who wrote about his experiences so entertainingly, with an effortless, self-effacing humor which Buford strains to match.

Bourdain and Buford may be the best known recent examples of “men writing about food” — but neither of them wins a place on my book shelf. Now that I think of it, there aren’t many male authors on that particular shelf; Brillat-Savarin’s inimitable The Physiology of Taste is the first title that comes to mind (the M. F. K. Fisher translation, of course); A. J. Liebling’s classic Between Meals another; Waverly Root’s The Food of France completes the trilogy; all three books are highly recommended.

My current favorite in this category is Liebling’s “literary gourmand” heir apparent, American novelist Jim Harrison, who gets a cameo in Heat:

The occasion was a visit to town by novelist Jim Harrison, a self-described “food lunatic.” Between Batali and Harrison, there was considerable admiration, and the exchanges between them constituted the table’s entertainment. For Mario, Harrison was the Homer, the Michelangelo, the Lamborghini, the Willie Mays, the Secretariat, the Jimi Hendrix of food intellectuals: “an expert, a hunter, an eater, a stalker, a rabid mongrel and a drinker, not afraid to get excited about the kind of nuts a particular partridge must have eaten this morning to taste so damned good for lunch.” Harrison, more modestly, described Batali as spiritual kin of some kind. “Probably from another life,” he said, in his gruff, barely audible, I’ve-lived-through-so-much-I’m-surprised-I’m-alive voice. Mario clarified: “From the other life of pigs.”

Buford goes on to describe the meal, with Harrison declining the oysters because he had “just returned from Normandy, where he’d tested a view of the nineteenth-century food writer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin that grand meals had once begun by guests’ eating a gross of oysters each.” In the name of research Harrison had tried this for himself; “he could not recommend the practice.”

In an interview published in last Thursday’s New York Times Harrison had this to say about the relationship between food and literature:

Food is a great literary theme. Food in eternity, food and sex, food and lust. Food is a part of the whole of life. Food is not separate.

Harrison writes an “Ir-regular Feature” about food in Brick magazine (one of many reasons to subscribe); the best of Harrison’s earlier food columns (from Esquire and Men’s Journal) have been collected in The Raw and the Cooked (2001).