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

by Bill Buford

  Frankie smashed it.

  This piece had been identical to the last one. I didn’t know what was wrong.

  “Get me another.”

  I cleaned up the smashed bread and got another piece. Frankie smashed it. I looked at him. What the fuck are you doing? He was profoundly, irretrievably irrational, as though some scary chemical thing was going on in his head. I looked for Andy, but he had turned away. This, too, was peculiar. Wasn’t he waiting for the very dish that we were failing to complete because Frankie was smashing the bread that needed to be toasted?

  “Get me another.”

  I got another piece, no different from the previous three pieces. Frankie took it, and we assembled the dish and put it up on the pass.

  It was a long night. There were other mishaps. At one point, Andy fired a branzino, but I hadn’t heard the order (could I have not heard it?) and hadn’t cooked one. Later it was an order of lamb chops. Had I missed that too? I stared at Andy. His face said nothing.

  Maybe there were more things. The night was a blur. When John Mainieri came into the kitchen and said “All in,” I was overcome with relief. It was early, only eleven o’clock. I’d been there since one. I was drenched. My cook’s coat was stuck to my back; it had melted. When I got the chance to pee, it was bright yellow. I was dehydrated. The night had begun with such high expectations. I got home, I put a chair in front of a window and stared out and didn’t move until dawn.

  I WENT TO WORK the next day—with, perhaps, a noticeable lack of bounce in my step. I was the embodiment of slowness. Everything about me was slow. My thoughts were arrested in some kind of brain molasses. I could have been running in water. I had a career idea: I could be the mascot for the slow-food movement.

  Abby had returned but shouldn’t have. She was pale and fragile and couldn’t lift her arms. You can’t cook if you can’t move your arms. The kitchen had a real problem. The day before, Tony Liu had come in on his day off, just in case something went wrong. Today there was no backup. Abby knew she shouldn’t have come in; she also knew that she was expected. The kitchen motto: no one gets ill. (Until I worked there, I’d always wondered why so many people in New York suddenly got ill in the winter. Was it the subway and the exposure to so many germy people pressed together? Or simply that most people in New York don’t cook at home and get their meals from a professional kitchen?)

  Once again the same challenge. Was I ready?

  Yes. And yes.

  I set up the station. I saw what was missing. I cooked and browned my fennel. I cut my rosemary—fast: bam, bam, bam. I sorted out the thyme. I prepared six sauté pans of rabbit. And the more I did, the looser I got, like an athlete warming up. The thickness in my head melted away. My movements became more fluid. I completed a task and knew what I had to do next and what I needed to do after that one was done. The service started. I was ready. I fell into a rhythm. I was seeing the kitchen in a way I’d never seen it. I seemed to be seeing everything. Was this adrenaline? Was it a clarity that comes from exhaustion? I couldn’t explain why I was feeling so good, especially after feeling so bad. I knew where everyone was at every point in their preparations. I understood all the tickets and all the items on them. I was working with Frankie, but again somehow, I don’t know how, I knew what he was going to do before he did it, when he wanted something before he asked for it. “Bill, I need the—” but whatever it was (red onions, sprouts, a piece of bread) I already had it. I was cooking: fast, hard, effectively. It was the most satisfying evening of labor I’d ever experienced.

  When the evening was over, I sat at the bar. I had to cool down. I asked Tom for a beer. Frankie appeared and sat on the stool next to me. He wanted to thank me. “You did good. Don’t let no one tell you no different. You saved our ass.”

  I finished my beer. Okay. I did good. I liked that.

  PASTA-MAKER

  My experience of Neapolitan gastronomy was expanded by an invitation to a dinner, the main feature of which was a spaghetti-eating competition. Such contests have been a normal feature of social life, latterly revived and raised almost to the level of a cult as a result of the reappearance on the black market of the necessary raw materials.

  Present: men of gravity and substance, including an ex–Vice Questore, a director of the Banca di Roma, and several leading lawyers—but no women. The portions of spaghetti were weighed out on a pair of scales before transfer to each plate. The method of attack was the classic one, said to have been introduced by Fernando IV, and demonstrated by him for the benefit of an ecstatic audience in his box at the Naples Opera. The forkful of spaghetti is lifted high into the air, and allowed to dangle and then drop into the open mouth, the head being held well back. I noticed that the most likely-looking contestants did not attempt to chew the spaghetti, but appeared to hold it in the throat which, when crammed, they emptied with a violent convulsion of the Adam’s apple—sometimes going red in the face as they did so. Winner: a sixty-five-year-old doctor who consumed four heaped platefuls weighing 1.4 kilograms, and was acclaimed by hand-clapping and cheers. These he cheerfully acknowledged and then left the room to vomit.

  —NORMAN LEWIS, Naples ’ 44

  16

  I WAS NOW PREOCCUPIED by the question of when, in the long history of food on the Italian peninsula, cooks started putting eggs in their pasta dough. Was this a reasonable concern? Of course not. But the question wouldn’t go away. It also raised other issues that got me thinking as well, including the possibility that the word “pasta” was misleading, if not outright wrong. Conventionally, there are two versions, dried and wet—right? The dried, like linguine, is called pastasciutta, and the wet, like Miriam’s tortellini, is called pasta fresca. But now I believe that they are much more different than most people realize and that it is only an accident of language that makes them seem as if they’re the same. They’re made with different kinds of wheat (durum, the protein-heavy kind, goes into the dried; ordinary bread flour, from a starchier grain, goes into the soft), in different preparations (one is dressed with olive oil, from a tree; the other with butter, from a cow), and from wholly different cultures: dried pasta appeared in Sicily in the early twelfth century (nearly two hundred years before Marco Polo returned from visiting the Chinese, possibly bearing their version), and had been introduced by Arab traders, who would have known nothing about the fresh kind, even though it had already been around for a thousand years in a form known to us as lasagna, to the Romans as laganum, and to the Greeks as laganon.

  The confusion arises from the fact that, until the second half of the twentieth century, “pasta” wasn’t really a kitchen word (you almost never see it in the old cookbooks) but an inventory word, meaning a food, any food, savory or sweet, made with dough. (It appears as a bookkeeping item in Cagliari in 1351, used by Sardinian shipping agents to distinguish crates of dried noodles from the other cargo on their docks: salted fish, wheels of cheese, wine, sheep, canisters of saffron, and that stuff stacked up against the wall—that’s right, that dough stuff, the pasta thing, that goes over there.)

  Instead of dried pasta, you had macaroni. That had been the generic word people used for five centuries or so, meaning not just the tubular kind but all kinds, originating in Sicily and then spreading to Sardinia and Naples and shipped through Genoa to the principal ports of Europe. Thomas Jefferson ate it in France and was so taken with it that he dispatched trunkloads home, becoming the first person to introduce dried pasta to the United States. (Twenty-six years later, his annual order was fifty pounds, enough for two hundred and fifty meals. He doubled it in 1817, plus an extra fifty pounds for his grandson, and doubled it again the following year: having acquired the taste, he, like so many of us, couldn’t get enough.)

  Macaroni has always been big business; fresh pasta never could be. Fresh pasta was made in the North, usually by women in homes or small kitchens, not in factories, and by its perishable nature was impossible to export. It was sold, therefore, by the people who had just prepar
ed it—since the 1300s, by lasagnari, lasagna makers, because “lasagna” was the generic term for what we now think of as a fresh pasta: a dough rolled out into a sheet (una sfoglia) from which you then cut, square, twist, stuff, and make the many possible toys that, among Italians, go by the name of dinner. Since Greek and Roman times, lasagna was flour and water, kneaded to stretch out the unique proteins of wheat and unite them with water molecules to produce the elastically accommodating combination known as gluten—the enduring mystery of the European meal. And since Greek and Roman times, there was no egg in the dough until—when?

  There is no egg in a recipe in the Liber de coquina, written by an anonymous author at the end of the 1200s, which calls for a sheet of fermented pasta (a quasi-leavened dough mixed with an uncooked bit from the last meal). The sheet is rolled out as thin as possible, più sottile che puoi, and cut up into squares, no wider than the length of your finger, which are boiled and served with cheese and spices, probably nutmeg and cinnamon—a simple pasta, and one that reminded me of the trip Joe Bastianich and I took to Porretta Terme, where Betta made a similar preparation called quadrini, “little squares,” dressed with butter and parmigiano.

  There are no eggs in the Tuscan version of Liber de coquina, written in the late 1300s. The anonymous author (anonimo Toscano) calls for a good white flour (farina bona, bianca)—the fluffy, starchy kind—and recommends dressing it with cheese or lardo. There are no eggs in the later Venetian version (written by another suspiciously anonymous author, anonimo Veneziano).

  By the fifteenth century, there are still no eggs: none, it seems, in the pasta made by Maestro Martino, although he does call for egg whites, a breakthrough of sorts. He uses them in his Sicilian macaroni, to make the noodles stiffer, but says nothing about what to do with the leftover yolks. The lack of instruction is perplexing because the Maestro loved his eggs (poached in sweet wine, grilled, coddled, roasted, made into shapes, cooked in milk or oil or on red-hot coals) and recommends using one as a binding agent to hold together the ingredients inside the ravioli. What he doesn’t say is to put another in the dough that you make the ravioli from.

  THE QUESTION was pressing because, at the last minute, I’d impulsively got on an airplane and gone to Italy. The reason, of course, was pasta, once again. I don’t want to diminish the importance of my time at the Babbo pasta station—I will remember it for the rest of my life, if only for what I now know about linguine and shellfish—but, in essential ways, I was very far removed from the real thing. After all, I was learning how to make a rustic, age-old, highly local Italian preparation in a fast, busy, metropolitan kitchen in New York City. I wasn’t even being taught by an Italian but by cooks who had been taught by other cooks who had been taught by Mario who (finally!) had been taught by an Italian. And the pasta itself was produced on a machine, whereas I was always hearing that the best kind is rolled out by hand on a wooden board with a matterello—the long Italian rolling pin, round at one end to shape a sheet of dough into a square—and the result, made with wood on wood, was supposed to have that cat’s-tongue texture that Mario was always going on about, like his grandmother’s ravioli or Miriam’s tortelli. That was what I still longed to make, and, after all this time, I didn’t know how. So why not ask Miriam herself?

  I called. Miriam, I said, I want to work with you.

  “Certo,” she said. “Phone me when you are next in Italy and come by one afternoon.”

  This was difficult. I wasn’t thinking of an afternoon when I happened to be in the zona, but, you know, a couple of weeks. A month. Or longer: something planned for, with lodgings and all the trappings of an apprenticeship.

  She panicked. “What are you talking about? A month? I never let anyone into my kitchen—ever.” (She made a funny sound. Was she having trouble breathing?) “I don’t know what to say. Are you crazy?” She was very angry.

  That plan didn’t work out, but I had another opportunity the very next week. The occasion was a visit to New York by Valeria Piccini, the chef of Da Caino, widely regarded as the best restaurant in Italy, located in Montemerano, a hill town in the Maremma, the southern part of Tuscany by the sea. Alain Ducasse—the most renowned French chef at the time—had invited Valeria over to be guest chef at his New York restaurant. I wanted to meet her and managed to attend the event.

  For Valeria, the evening was an unmitigated disaster. The kitchen was wrong. There were too many people—they were heartless and too efficient—and she was compelled to make food she hadn’t touched (“I need to touch every dish”) and on plates so impersonal she couldn’t bear to look at them (“I had to close my eyes”). The pasta was a catastrophe, she declared, appearing at the end of the meal, on the verge of tears. She apologized to the Italians (who nodded, knowingly; with no idea that anything was wrong, I had devoured my plate in a condition of brainless contentment) and collapsed into a chair next to me. She didn’t understand how it had gone so badly. She had made the dough in the normal way, she explained (to me, to the ceiling, to no one): so much egg, so much flour, but the result was wrong. She threw it out. Maybe she’d forgotten something. She made it again—so much egg, so much flour—but it still wasn’t right. “I was confused. How can this be?” By now orders were coming in. “I want to go to bed. I want to go back to my hotel and hide. I’m so embarrassed.” She paused, distressed. Physically, she resembled Miriam—the hooked, masculine nose; the broad face; the white chef’s cap; but younger (forty-five to Miriam’s sixty-two). Like Miriam, she’d worked in only one kitchen (her own), in the same restaurant (her own), and in her own town. I remember thinking: you don’t meet people like this in New York.

  “Was it the flour?” she was saying softly. “People told me to bring my own. I said, ‘What are you talking about? This is the best restaurant in New York.’ The eggs? People told me to bring eggs. ‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘They have chickens in America.’”

  I listened to this sad monologue, utterly captivated. (Actually, that’s not quite true: in one ear, I listened to it, uncomprehendingly; in the other, I listened to my wife, Jessica, a fluent Italian speaker, translating it for me.) The monologue confirmed everything I had thought about pasta. It was so simple and yet so difficult. Simple ingredients (flour, egg) and a simple process (making a dough), and yet, even in the hands of a great chef, it didn’t work, and she had no idea why.

  “Let me work for you!” I blurted out in English.

  She looked at me blankly.

  “Let me work for you!” I repeated. I’d got very excited. “I can leave tomorrow!”

  She was puzzled, and I could see my message was taking a long time to get through. Maybe my enthusiastic American thrustingness wasn’t the strategic approach. In fact, once my message had finally been understood, I could see that my enthusiasm was not, by any means, reciprocated. She straightened up, seemed to remember where she was (when I saw myself as I must have appeared to her—as a stranger with an inexplicable capacity to enthuse about plates of failed food). “Oh,” she said guardedly, in English, “you want to be an intern?”

  “Yes!” I said. “Yes! Yes!”

  “I’m afraid that would be very difficult to arrange.”

  So that plan didn’t work out either. Why? I didn’t know why. Because she doesn’t like Americans? Because she didn’t like me? Because she’s a xenophobic, grumpy Italian mountain person, suspicious of strangers? Or was it because she didn’t want to share her pasta secrets? That was obviously why, although, now, after the event, I recognize that there might have been another element.

  The clue is the word “intern.” Italy is in an intern crisis, and chefs of any stature have lists of people wanting to be their slaves. You’d think such a state of affairs would be a happy phenomenon—why waste money on labor when you can get yours free?—but it’s a problem. Most of the slaves are Japanese, but there are also virtually every nationality except the French. Slavery is so much the rage that you now need permission to be one: there are slave regulations, sla
ve visas, a protocol, and a slave stamp in your passport that you get only by applying to the Italian immigration authorities, supported by a written “contract” with a restaurant that includes its pledge not to pay you for the work it has already agreed to make you do. (It is a curious moment in the history of kitchen labor relations.) In fact, unknown to me, Mark Barrett—in many ways, my intrepid role model in this matter—had found himself outside the law. His not having one of those I’m-your-slave-don’t-pay-me visas meant that the restaurant he’d indentured himself to couldn’t exploit him. Mark had managed to work without pay for about four weeks before finally being told he had to go home. His New York friends weren’t ready to welcome him back. In the words of one, they were “still recovering from all the festivities” of his leave-taking. (“Oops,” Mario said. “I guess things have changed since I last worked there.”)

  One day, I found myself sitting with Mario and Mark. Mark was miserable, still trying to figure out how to get around a law he didn’t understand and return to Italy and work for people for no pay, when an obvious idea occurred to Mario.

  “Why not work for Gianni and Betta?” he declared. “Gianni knows everyone, he’ll figure out the visa. You only have to work for him for a few months, and, in exchange, he’ll fix you up so you can stay for years.”

  Mark mulled this over. Maybe Gianni could sort out the visa. But when Mario had worked for Gianni and Betta, they’d been running La Volta, a serious restaurant with serious ambitions. Now they had a pizzeria. Why should Mark go to Italy to work at a pizzeria?

  “Why?” Mario replied, with exaggerated astonishment. “Because it’s a pizzeria that serves pizza and pasta, and because Betta makes the pasta.”

  Which was why I was in Porretta. It was also why I’d got so interested in the egg, because, on my first morning, watching Betta prepare the dough, I saw that an egg was a modern pasta’s most important ingredient, provided it was a very good egg, which was evident (or not) the moment you cracked it open. If the white was runny, you knew the egg had come from a battery-farmed animal, cooped up in a cage, and the pasta you made from it would be sticky and difficult to work with, exactly like the unhappy batch Betta produced one evening after Gianni fell asleep, having had too much wine at lunch, and failed to buy eggs from the good shop before it closed and had to drive to the next town to the cattivo alimentarii, the nasty store, and pick up a dozen of its mass-produced product. The yolk was also illuminating. The nasty store’s were pale yellow, like those most of us have been scrambling for our urban lives. But a proper yolk is a different color and, in Italian, is still called il rosso, the red bit, arising from a time when you ate eggs in spring and summer, the egg season, and they came from grain-fed, half-wild, not just free-ranging but virtually proprietorial chickens that produced a yolk more red than yellow, a bright primary intensity that you can see today if you’re lucky enough to get your eggs not from a supermarket but a local mercato or a small farm.