Cooks -- United States |
Cooking -- France -- History. |
Food habits -- France. |
Lyon (France) |
Burford, Bill -- Travel -- France -- Lyon. |
Cookery |
Cuisine |
Food preparation |
Eating |
Food customs |
Foodways |
Human beings -- Food habits |
Lyons (France) |
Lugdunum (France) |
Lion (France) |
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Summary
Summary
"You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford's Dirt , an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France." -- The Wall Street Journal
What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon's best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen.
With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
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". Buford not only listens to chef Anne Sophie Pic declaring that her cooking is "the food of emotion", he compounds this hyperbole with the qualification that "the emotions expressed in it must be many: longing, sadness, tenderness, loss. There is also rage. A rage against mortality. A rage against injustice." To sample this rage, and much else besides, on a "sensory journey in 10 stages" costs ¿320 per head without wine. Buford's immersion is largely in a rarefied world of high craft, one concerned with "paintings on a plate", recondite flavours and ingredients touched by dozens of fingers. This is the world of the tyrannical Michelin guide and of aspirants to its stellar approbation. Many aspire, few achieve: and those who do are often bankrupted by the effort to keep up the appearances that Michelin demands. It is explained to Buford that one cook, Sylvain, "is not good enough"; he "is a bistro chef". Sylvain has proved to be a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work, a bullied boy who has turned into a bully himself. He had relentlessly antagonised Buford. The writer has a humanity and decency that are seldom to be found in the quasi-martial milieu of the kitchen ruled by punishments and omerta. So he sympathises. Sylvain "had the manner of a man betrayed: not just by the restaurant but by the culture of the kitchen, by France". It is a given that a bistro chef inhabits a lower rung of the hierarchical ladder than a gastronomic chef. Amazingly, bistro chefs accept this and give forelock to the "superior" breed, with its full apparatus of chefbiz: marketing, PR, gimmicks, restaurants all over the world, awestruck food "writers" such as Ruth Reichl and wearisome "molecular" cuisiniers like Marc Veyrat, another wildflower obsessive with a sideline in bark, who demonstrates just how characterful he is by wearing black capes and hats like a panto villain, and who, on a visit to New York, "forages" in Central Park. What daring! The stage for all this chefolatry is Lyon; deemed by the writer Curnonsky in the 1930s to be gastronomic capital of France, and thus of the world. Buford describes it as a "seldom visited beautiful gem of a city". That "seldom visited" is puzzling because it has for many decades been a cynosure of the gastronomically curious and the very greedy, a pilgrimage site for the global stomach. Standards are very high. Buford is a persuasive advocate for the rough edges of what was his adopted home. He still longs for its "gritty darkness, the sewage smells, the graffiti, the cobblestone streets ... its low cloud of melancholy". His affection for the everyday details and specificities of the place is attractive. But it is, strangely, not matched by an enthusiasm for the vernacular cooking of the city. Most of the dishes he painstakingly masters belong to the repertoire of haute cuisine, which while it may have its foundations in a particular locus, is international - think of those empire-building, jet-lagged chefs with concessions and brigades in Oman, Hong Kong, Miami, London, Rio. The vernacular should be in a state of perpetual stasis, thrilling in its immutability. At Georges Blanc's marvellous Ancienne Auberge in Vonnas, the dishes are those made by his grandmother. They are not adapted, not given a wretched "twist". The cooking of the Lyonnaises mères was a collective marvel: despite being the wrong gender, Paul Bocuse was the last and greatest of them. Although Buford is fascinated by chicken cooked in a pig's bladder and details the preparation with gusto, he is not keen on tripe, assorted innards and extremities - which can be a problem in a city devoted to their ingestion. Here is a gastro instance of the broader culture clash that informs much of his life in the city. For the Lyonnais/New York chef Daniel Boulud, who opened many doors for Buford, Lyon is a "time-warp city", which accords with Bertrand Tavernier's neat aphorism "the last time I saw Paris it was in Lyon". Lyon is what France was an indefinite time ago: Buford is lucky to have lived there then. He has written a report from that past.
Kirkus Review
An American family revels in French culture and cuisine. Journalist and foodie Buford, a writer and editor for the New Yorker and former longtime editor of Granta, follows Heat (2006), his chronicle of cooking in Italy, with an ebullient, entertaining memoir of life in Lyon, where he, his wife, and two young sons settled so that he could indulge his desire to learn French cooking. Planning to stay six months, they wound up living in the city, renowned for its gastronomy, for several years, during which Buford worked for a baker, gained admission to an acclaimed cooking school, and toiled among the staff of a famous restaurant. The first months were difficult, he admits: "each member of our small family had come to doubt the wisdom of the project." But he and his sons learned French (the children more quickly than their father), the boys assimilated to school, and his wife pursued her ambition to earn a diploma as a wine expert. Buford honed his skills as a chef and enthusiastically steeped himself in the culture of the French kitchen, where apprentices suffer "unregulated bullying and humiliation." As the author demonstrates, French kitchens are no less hierarchical and combative than those in Italy, and nothing less than perfection is tolerated. It "was all about rules: that there was always one way and only one way" to peel asparagus, for example, devein goose livers, and construct puff pastry; that the three principles of a French plate are "color, volume, and texture"; and that the secret of glorious bread, meat, cheese, and wine is the soil. "What makes Lyonnais food exceptional," Buford writes, is "a chef's access to the nearby ingredients" from local farms, mountain lakes, and rivers. "Lyon," he adds, "is a geographical accident of good food and food practices." He describes in mouthwatering detail the many dishes he cooked and ate and the charming restaurants the family visited. A lively, passionate homage to fine food. (first printing of 125,000) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Having learned his way around a Tuscan kitchen (Heat, 2006), Buford used his connections with American chefs to garner a novice's spot as cook in a French restaurant. He settles for nothing less than an apprenticeship in Lyon, esteemed as France's gastronomic capital. Uprooting his wife and twin sons from New York City in itself proves quite an accomplishment, dealing with an exacting bureaucracy to produce necessary visas, finding a place to live, and enrolling the boys in school. Cooking at La Mère Brazier and attending classes at L'Institut Bocuse, France's premier culinary school, proves daunting enough for the language barrier alone, but even more challenging to earn respect in the closed world of chefdom. Buford's fellow cooks are barely out of their teen years and not above physical violence when provoked. He delves into the controversial origins of French cuisine and restaurants, drawing unflinching portraits of past and present luminaries like culinary school founder Paul Bocuse himself. He pursues origins of dishes, sauces, and their ingredients, even participating in the stark grittiness of butchering a pig and learning that in France the best, most coveted flavors come from the earthiest animal organs. An inside look into haute cuisine.
Library Journal Review
Once you've mastered Italian cuisine, what's next? New Yorker writer Buford (Heat) recounts his time working for Mario Batali, and deciding to move--along with his wife and twin toddler sons--to Lyon, France. From a rocky start, which included missed flights and difficulty securing visas, Buford eventually found work in a local bakery, studied at L'Institut Bocuse, and navigated the hierarchy of the award-winning La Mére Brazier. But besides grueling days at the restaurant, Buford also spends time investigating the contentious history of French cuisine (could there be a connection with the Italian Medici daughters, who moved to France when they married?), and researching the seminal recipes of Brillat-Savarin. The author and his family remain in France for five years before returning to New York. VERDICT An often funny and eye-opening behind-the-scenes look at haute cuisine, as well as life as an expat in France. Readers will be engrossed not only by Buford's story, but that of his family as well.--Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH