Review from the Sydney Morning Herald

Four years ago, Bill Buford went to work for Mario Batali, an exuberant celebrity chef with red hair and a ruddy face, in the kitchen of his New York restaurant, Babbo. Buford, then the fiction editor at The New Yorker magazine and close to 50 years old, embarked on an adventure that was the culinary equivalent of base jumping.

Not only did Buford get to see how much adrenaline he could endure, he sensed that by plunging into the netherworld of hot pans, hot tempers and hot egos, he’d come up with a hot story. He came up with several and dishes them out as a rollicking read. He also embarked on an odyssey into the heart and history of Italian eating.

I could not put this book down. If you like documentaries about real life experiences, read this. The author’s journey from Kitchen Slave to Butcher’s Apprentice is well written and gripping, and reinforced my feeling that a professional kitchen is a place for masochists and perfectionists and people who are just plain crazy.

I learnt a lot from this book - the evolution of Polenta, the Renaissance in cooking in medieval Europe, how food shapes a culture and how that culture shapes the food right back and why so much meat was eaten in days of yore.

Highly recommended. And if you get a chance to read Thugs, by the same author, take it.

from the book:
I was by now possibly a little fixated on what I’d come to regard as the polenta question … and, from what I could tell, my fixation was shared by almost no one else in the world. We all have our limitations, and, in the matter of polenta, mine date from a specific meal, and , like a chemist unable to reproduce lab results of an experiment that had succeeded once, I hadn’t eaten anything like it since, although I kept trying. Until then, I couldn’t imagine what the appeal of polenta might be, because, until then, the only kind I’d known was the two-minute instant variety - pour into boiling water, stir once, serve - and the result tastes of nothing most of us are able to remember. I’d been utterly unprepared for the real thing, therefore, when I happened to have a bowl of it in an Italian restaurant. The chef had bought her cornmeal from an artisanal miller in Piemonte and the polenta she made was a revelation - each grain swollen from the slow simmering and yet still rough, even gravelly, against the roof of my mouth. For a moment, it put me in mind of risotto. but risotto is cooked in broth, and finished with butter and cheese, and tastes of the rice and everything else you’ve added. These crunchy stone-ground corn grains tasted only of themselves: an intense, sweet, highly extracted corn-ness. In an instant, I had a glimpse of the European diet at a juncture of radical change. For one generation, dinner had been gray, as it had been since the beginning of time; for the next generation, dinner was crunchy, sweet, and golden.

Polenta originally was made with barley, which gives a gray and tasteless much [Bill cooked this for himself[ so when the Italians found cornmeal they went a little made, and ate so much they got Pellagra [niacin deficiency]. It took 200 years to find out what was causing this. The other major outbreak of Pellagra was in the Southern States, early in the twentieth century, when the cause of Pellagra was known, but people still could not stop eating delicious, yummy, golden corn.