Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  Elisa was thin and sporty. On her days off, she trained for marathons and sometimes ran to work in the dawn, about six miles. (“There’s no point in arriving clean and fresh, is there?”) Her hair was graying, and she had a narrow, high-cheekboned face. Gina didn’t exercise. She had thick black hair, and was distinctly rounder, as you’d expect her to be, tasting syrups, chocolates, and creamy batters all day. She was the only person with a cell phone—in the kitchen, private calls were forbidden—partly because she looked after her own ingredients and did her own ordering, but also because she didn’t want to cross the kitchen to use the phone located on a wall where Elisa works. (The issue wasn’t the distance but the company she’d have to keep when she got there.) Besides, Gina was a talker and couldn’t be without a phone.

  Elisa wasn’t chatty. Mornings would pass without her saying a word. Everything—her manner, the efficiency of her movements, her face, with its firm, no-nonsense look—said purposefulness. She was capable of sulkiness (“When she’s in one of her moods, the whole kitchen knows about it,” Gina complained), but you never learned why: you didn’t know much about Elisa’s private life. You knew too much about Gina’s. You knew when, last year, she’d had a date, and what had happened, and what his name was, and then she’d wonder aloud if she’d ever date again.

  “Don’t you have a flight to catch?” Gina asked me. She knew this from the morning’s chitchatty exchanges. “You should leave. I mean, really, the way we treat our externs: it’s not as if you’re getting paid.”

  I nodded sympathetically, wanting to make nice, a little confused, because I didn’t yet understand the extern concept. (Externs answer to Elisa, I now understand, and the real issue for Gina was her belief that Elisa was a dour, unfriendly slave driver. Or maybe Gina was jealous that she didn’t have any slaves of her own.)

  Gina continued to stare at me. I stood dumbly with my tray of morels.

  “Really, you need to go. Now.”

  She shrugged and walked out. Andy, satisfied by his branzino count, followed her. It was just me and Elisa.

  “You do not answer to that woman,” Elisa said in a low, angry voice. She was still on the floor; I was still holding my tray of morels. “Do you understand me? You leave when I say you can leave. I am your boss. I tell you when you can go. Have I made myself clear?”

  I stuttered pathetically. It was four o’clock—when the prep kitchen is normally finished—but I could see there was still a lot to do.

  I returned to the kitchen, bearing my tray of morels, and thought about what had taken place. The outburst had surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: I was familiar with what I regarded as the shoulder-rubbing edginess of the kitchen. I’d seen it between Elisa and Memo Trevino. Memo was one of the two sous-chefs—a big man with a disproportionately big head of wiry black hair, and, at twenty-eight, emphatically in possession of an authority of someone many years older. If Memo accidentally knocked you, the blow came from the torso, not because his belly was so big but because he always led with the groin. More than once a picture popped in my head—no idea from where—of Memo with a spear and headdress. His was the swagger of a tribal chief.

  I’d been in the prep kitchen three weeks when Memo took me aside, wanting to know what I thought of Elisa’s cooking. I was so unprepared for anyone’s soliciting my opinion I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “It’s not exactly perfect, is it?”

  “What’s not perfect?” I asked.

  “The food.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Ever notice how much food she burns?” He was whispering.

  No, I hadn’t noticed, although, it was true, there’d been a tray of burnt beef cheeks.

  “Precisely. It’s unacceptable. Ever notice the dullness of her knife?”

  I pondered the question. Actually, I’d experienced her knife firsthand and had not found it dull.

  “Let me put it this way. Ever notice her sharpening it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “A few times.” By then I knew the knife rituals. Frank Langello was especially proud of his. Frankie was the other sous-chef. He was about the same age as Memo, an Italian American, with wavy black hair, preternaturally long eyelashes, and the skinny good looks of one of those crooners from the forties and fifties, like a young Sinatra in the Hoboken years. Frankie and Memo had worked together at Le Cirque, a four-star restaurant then run by the famously fanatical Sottha Khunn, and they both felt they were among the few people at Babbo who understood the importance of kitchen discipline, which, evidently, included knife care. Frankie used only cheap ones, because he whipped them so ruthlessly against a sharpening steel that the blades wore out. Every now and then he used a whetstone, for even more edge: he tested the sharpness by shaving his forearms. (“When the hair grows back, I get out the whetstone again.”)

  Memo was shaking his head. “That’s my point—a few times. You’ve seen Elisa sharpen her knife a few times. Trust me. Her knife is a stick. The problem is this—she lacks the dedicated, serious approach. Great chefs,” he explained, “are born, not made. It’s in your blood, or it’s not: the passion.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It was a pretty small space for such strong positions. Memo didn’t like Elisa because she wasn’t serious enough. Gina didn’t like her because she was too serious. And Elisa didn’t like Gina because she wasn’t serious enough. (“Most restaurants have pastry chefs who actually work,” Elisa said most mornings when Gina was chirpily chatting on her cell phone.)

  The walk-in episode was illuminating in another way.

  When I’d started, I’d jokingly referred to myself as a kitchen slave. Now I had a new understanding. I was a kitchen slave. That was the role: morning kitchen slave. In effect, I had entered into a contract: I was indentured. In the mornings, I gave Elisa my time, and she gave me instruction, and the instruction was precious enough that it entitled her to my time, exclusively, and the Ginas of the kitchen had better watch how they talked to me.

  Others showed me how to do things as well. (“I am a great teacher,” Memo told me after showing me how to bone a wild boar shoulder, “and people always tell me this is what I should do, teach, but I have one problem—impatience.”) But most of my instruction was from Elisa. To my astonishment, she took me seriously. I was a project; I was being educated in how to be a cook.

  The truth is, I was grateful for the run-in in the walk-in, Gina and Elisa squabbling over me: there was so much work that even I was needed. I wanted to be needed. I longed for a day when my presence would make a difference. Ever since that first kitchen meeting, I’d imagined my putting in so much time that I’d be trusted to cook on the line—maybe to cover for someone in an emergency or during an unexpected crunch. I didn’t share these thoughts with Mario or Elisa or Memo, if only because I was still the guy who didn’t know how to cut an onion without slicing into the palm of his hand. And yet I was being taken seriously: I wasn’t allowed to leave.

  Or maybe the truth was much simpler: Elisa needed help, and instead she had me.

  SOMETIMES ELISA startled me. I’d be working at top speed, nervously waiting for her to appear and ask if I’d finished the five things she’d asked me to do so she could give me something else (and, invariably—and I mean “invariably”—I was still at work on the first one), when, out of nowhere, she’d give me a cup of hot chocolate or a piece of meat. “Wow! Thank you!” If she was preparing skirt steak for the evening—the cheap cut from the belly or “skirt” of the cow, needing to be cut thin and cooked hot and fast—she might keep back a few strips, season them aggressively, throw them onto the flattop, and put them out on a platter. (A flattop is a flat piece of steel that sits atop the gas burners of an oven—welded on, so little heat escapes: you can crowd more things onto a flattop than a conventional stove, and it gets very hot—a skirt steak cooks in seconds.) Once she boned a turkey and rolled it up with dandelion greens and goat cheese. Her dishes were high in protein and very salty. Wh
en making them, she got a slightly distracted look, as if a tune were playing in her head. These moments seemed important and were the only times Elisa relaxed. She didn’t smile—she never got that comfortable—but you could tell that she was thinking of smiling.

  Making food seemed to be something everyone needed to do: not for the restaurant, but for the kitchen. There was the family meal, of course—bountifully served around four in the afternoon—but food was almost always being made by someone at some time all day long. The practice seemed to illustrate a principle I was always hearing referred to as “cooking with love.” A dish was a failure because it hadn’t been cooked with love. A dish was a success because the love was so obvious. If you’re cooking with love, every plate is a unique event—you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it: your food, made with your hands, arranged with your fingers, tasted with your tongue.

  One Saturday, when neither Andy nor Elisa was around, Memo took me aside again. “Let me show you how to cook with love.” He suddenly wanted to make an impromptu family supper. He’d found some beef tongues in the walk-in, which I suspect had been intended for a special: no matter, they were his now. He poached them, grilled them, and sliced them, then mixed the meat in a bowl with his own spicy hot sauce. “This is how you make tacos,” he said, assembling his concoction on a platter: tortillas stacked on top of tortillas, along with several pounds of tongue and great quantities of tomato and lemon zest. It was my first five-story taco. It bore no resemblance to any taco I’d seen before—in fact, towering so, with gobs of cream cheese spread along the side, it looked more like a wedding cake—but it remains the best taco I’ve eaten.

  You can’t really cook like this when you’re in a busy kitchen, but somehow everyone, at some point, made the time to prepare something intimate. It seemed to be at the heart of why you were a cook. Elisa once told me that in her ideal life, she would “cook only at home, with my friends at my table.” Gina put it more forcefully: “I invite you to my house, spend all day preparing your meal, watch your face as you eat it, bite by bite, and you tell me I’m wonderful? Whoa! That’s awesome!”

  One morning Gina came up with a new dessert. “Does that have too much almond in it?” she asked, feeding it to me by hand.

  I thought: she’s not interested in my opinion. “No, Gina, it’s perfect.”

  “Does this have too much almond?” she asked a guy delivering artichokes, putting a slice in his mouth, while he stood awkwardly, unable to use his hands, while Gina brushed a crumb off his lower lip.

  “Hmm…“ he said, talking through the food, “this is delicious.”

  “Does this have too much almond?” she asked Andy, seconds after he showed up just after noon. Andy waited for Gina to put the piece in his mouth, leaning forward, his lips puckered as though for a kiss.

  “Gina, you’re a genius.”

  And so it went, ten different people, each one fed by hand.

  I find myself thinking of Mrs. Waters’s seduction of Tom Jones, in the Henry Fielding novel. Actually, I see the movie version with the young Albert Finney, where “passions and appetites” blur and Mrs. Waters’s soft sighs commingle with Tom’s energetic consumption of a vast piece of roast beef. Food has always had erotic associations, and I suspect that cooking with love is an inversion of a different principle: cooking to be loved. The premise of a romantic meal is that by stimulating and satisfying one appetite another will be analogously stimulated as well. How exactly does Tom Jones’s appetite for a rib medium rare stimulate a craving for Mrs. Waters? Fresh pasta cooked in butter, Mario once told me, illustrating how these things seem to conjoin, “swells like a woman aroused.” Marjoram, he said on another occasion, has the oily perfume of a woman’s body: “It is the sexiest of the herbs.” Lidia, Joe Bastianich’s mother, was more explicit. “What else do you put in another person’s body?” she asked me rhetorically when I met her for lunch one day. “Do you understand?”

  4

  PORRETTA TERME, 1989. The small restaurant of La Volta was perched high above the town of Porretta Terme, on a hill overlooking a mountainous valley between Bologna and Florence. Mario arrived by train on a Monday afternoon in November, bearing golf clubs, even though there was no golf course for a hundred miles, and an electric guitar with a small boom-box amplifier (“total fuzz at volume three”), in the hope that when he ran low on money he could cover his expenses by busking. He was wearing pajama-like pantaloons and red clogs. But there was no one to meet him (“I arrived alone at the train station of bumfuck”). He didn’t know how to use the phones and couldn’t speak Italian. When Roberto and Gianni Valdiserri finally tracked him down, they were astonished by what they saw. He did not look like the highest-paid sous-chef from the Four Seasons; he looked like an Albanian peasant, Roberto told me when I visited during a break from my time at Babbo.

  The “terme” in Porretta Terme means “baths” and refers to the local sulfur springs. On my first morning there, I was woken by an instructor on a loudspeaker leading an exercise class of overweight senior citizens in one of the pools. Italians are entitled to two annual visits, paid for by the government, and can have a number of irrigations (nasal, rectal, vaginal) to deal with bowel troubles, infertility, hot flashes, and creaky knees. In an older part of town, the buildings are from the eighteenth century, when affluent Bolognese families used to come here on summer holidays to escape the heat of the plains: grand rooms, high ceilings, tall windows with wooden shutters painted an orange-yellow evocative of Hapsburg Vienna. Many are abandoned; so, too, is the old rail station, built in an imperial style, carved into the side of a mountain. For nearly two centuries, the train, the best way of crossing the Appennines, stopped in Porretta (a “Porretta box” was sold on the platform—a prosciutto panino, a piece of fruit, a chunk of parmigiano, and a half bottle of Lambrusco). Now tourists arrive on charter buses, wearing bathing caps. I couldn’t find Porretta in any travel guides, although I located a first edition of Faith Willinger’s Eating in Italy, published the year Mario arrived. There was nothing about the town, but La Volta, in the nearby village of Borgo Capanne, was cited as “the rising star on the road known as the Porrettana” (the old highway at the bottom of the valley). “Giovanni Valdisseri presides in the rustic dining room, and his wife and sister-in-law work together in the kitchen,” Willinger wrote. “The salumi are local, and the pasta is hand rolled, freshly made, not to be skipped.”

  Borgo Capanne is six miles above Porretta. You reach it on a zigzaggy road of ferocious ascent. The first mile is nothing but sheerness until you come upon a church just before a village called Pieve. Pieve is old Italian for “country church.” After another mile, the land flattens out briefly, and you enter a village surrounded by small vegetable plots. This is Orti. An orto is a small vegetable farm. Poggio is next, resting atop a hill. Poggio means “hilltop.” Finally you reach Borgo Capanne. A capanna is a mountain hut; a borgo is a village: village of mountain huts. And if you climb the hill just above it you discover, predictably enough, stone ruins of the first habitations, sheltered in the woods. The modern part of the village has a wide view of the valley and the mountains (with volcanic cartoon peaks, like pyramids, covered by dense woods). Borgo Capanne is a cluster of interconnecting houses, everything adjoined honeycomb style, as though for protection—from the wild, from wolves, from whatever unknown thing might come up the road. To enter the honeycomb, you pass under a stone arch. In Italian, an arch is a volta. This is where you find the restaurant. Above the restaurant is an apartment: this was Mario’s new home.

  La Volta was closed the day Mario arrived, but a seasonal supper was prepared for him (“I am, like, holy fucking shit, family meal, and we’re having white truffles!”), and everyone introduced themselves. Roberto was the expediter, after he finished his day job (he was an engineer at a factory that had been making airplane parts since World War II, when Mussolini came up with the idea of hiding the manufacturing of his air force in the mountains
nearby). Roberto’s brother Gianni managed the place. His wife, Betta, was the cook. Her father, Quintiglio (“Quintiglio Canario, the fifth son of the canary, a beautiful name for a beautiful man”), was the forest forager, truffle scavenger, and mystic gardener, and he and Mario struck up an instant rapport: “So tickled to have an American in the village.”

  The next morning, Mario reported for duty. Betta didn’t show up for two more hours and then rolled out a giant sheet of pasta by hand. “It was the first food I saw,” Mario recalls, although he wouldn’t be allowed to touch the dough for two weeks. He took notes and embarked on a six-month apprenticeship in what he calls the “ladies’ trick of handmade pasta.” Betta went on to make stricchetti, small bow ties, served with porcini mushrooms and little red onions cooked in olive oil. She made a different pasta the next day and a different ragù, one made from guinea-hen legs, roasted until the bones fell out and the meat dissolved into a sauce. It was a month before anyone prepared a Bolognese, the traditional meat sauce of Emilia-Romagna. “They’d gotten bored of it,” Mario said, “but then they taught me how to make it, and that became my weekly task: veal, pork, beef, and pancetta, cooked slowly with olive oil and butter. Just browning and browning, although it never turns brown because of the fat that seeps out of the meat—which you leave there, it’s part of the dish—and add white wine and milk, and, at the end, a little tomato paste, so that it’s pink-brown.”

  He accompanied Quintiglio (“a salt-of-the-earth dude with big feet, strong hands, a deep voice, floppy Italian ears, and a buttoned-up shirt and jacket”) when he went looking for berries and mushrooms. He had rules about porcini and picked only the ones near oak and chestnut trees—the ones under the pines and poplars were inferior. His real talent was for finding truffles. When Armandino visited Mario the following year, he said, “It was as though God had arrived in town just before me—truffles were on everything.”