8
" 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: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
12
" 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
13
" 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
15
" 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
19
" 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's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
20
" 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's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany