Heat Quotes

“In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“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.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“I didn't want to be a chef: just a cook. And my experiences in Italy had taught me why. For millennia, people have known how to make their food. They have understood animals and what to do with them, have cooked with the seasons and had a farmer's knowledge of the way the planet works. They have preserved the conditions of preparing food, handed down through generations, and have come to know them as expressions of their families. People don't have this kind of knowledge today, even though it seems as fundamental as the earth, and, it's true, those who have it tend to be professionals -- like chefs. But I didn't want this knowledge in order to be a professional; just to be more human. (313)”
― Bill Buford, Heat

“Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“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:”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."

(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)

And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301)”
― Bill Buford, Heat

“The French have become professional, scientific, and urban. The Italians are improvising amateurs, following rustic preparations handed down for generations. The Italians, it could be said, were still playing with their food.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“Cooked fat is delicious. Uncooked fat is not. Why do you stuff a goose or duck? Chefs today don’t know because they don’t learn the basics anymore. You stuff the bird so it cooks more slowly. With the empty cavity, you let in the heat, and the bird is cooked inside and out, and the meat is done before your fat is rendered. Stuff your bird with apple and sage, and the fat is rendered first.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“I found, cooking on the line, that I got a quiet buzz every time I made a plate of food that looked exactly and aesthetically correct and then handed it over the pass to Andy. If, on a busy night, I made, say, fifty good-looking plates, I had fifty little buzz moments, and by the end of service I felt pretty good. These are not profound experiences—the amount of reflection is exactly zero—but they were genuine enough, and I can’t think of many other activities in a modern urban life that give as much simple pleasure.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“I stood in the doorway of one room, lost in a meditation of the house's recurring habits. People had made love here, sweated through pregnancy, gave birth, looked after children, became ill, died, the fire always burning in the kitchen. In this room, the next generation had done the same, the fire still burning. And the next generation, for thousand years.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“The text, written in Latin, was inspired by a fifteenth-century chef known as Maestro Martino and was called De honesta voluptate et valitudine, “On honest pleasures and good health.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality. (198)”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“I had to remind myself I was in a food shop. Even in New York, once famous for its rudeness, now stuck in a condition of permanent impatience, I had never seen anything like it. There, a retailer, however jaded, still pretends to honor the shopkeeper’s code that a customer is always right. Dario followed a much blunter, take no prisoners philosophy, that actually the customer is a dick.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“Historically time-stoppers don't have a great win-loss record, although they score high in the sentimental 'doing all the wrong things for the right reasons' stakes.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

“I’d have aged it a bit more,” Marco said, “but not much.” He explained that he had experimented with aging. What he said in fact was this: “I’ve aged birds for one day, two days, three days, four days, five days, six days, seven days, eight days, nine days, ten days, eleven days, twelve days, thirteen days, fourteen days, fifteen days, sixteen days, seventeen days, eighteen days, nineteen days, twenty days, and twenty-one days.” “Your conclusion?” I asked. “Twenty-one days is too long,” he said. “Pretty nasty?” I asked. “Fucking inedible,” he said.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

“I was taught how to tie up the loin with a butcher's looping knot and was so excited by the discovery that I went home and practiced. I told Elisa about my achievement. “I tied up everything,” I said. “A leg of lamb, some utensils, a chair. My wife came home, and I tied up her too.” Elisa shook her head. “Get a life,” she said and returned to her task.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany