The American writer suffers mockery and swallows chef ‘philosophy’ as he sets out to master high-craft cooking in Lyon
When he was merely middle-aged, Bill Buford quit as the fiction editor of the New Yorker to learn to become an Italian chef. That was a decade and a half ago. His progress and misadventures in New York kitchens and Tuscany were recorded in Heat. Now, older but absolutely no wiser, he decides on a whim to run away to France, where he’ll learn to become a French chef. He drags along his wife, Jessica Green, and twin sons, George and Frederick, who are a congenial presence in this artfully artless chronicle of cheffery, chef lore, chef “philosophy”, chef boorishness, chef hierarchies and chef cultishness. Buford is bullied, victimised and mocked by kitchen sociopaths half his age. What on earth propels him? There is evidently a sort of man-of-action masochism at play. The more hurtful the better. Niceness doesn’t make good copy.
A patsy, a chaotic, gaffe-prone near-loser who just about muddles through: that is how he casts himself and it’s the role he elects to perform much of the time. The Buford of Dirt shares a name with the sassy publishing operator he once was: a name, and not much else. He has a wide-eyed unknowingness and is happy to agree that in the wildflower-obsessed Michel Bras’s cooking there is an essence that “seems to radiate almost spiritually”.