Heat
I can't recommend Bill Buford's book Heat enough.
Part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is that I had come from reading several very difficult books and Heat is a purely pleasurable read with virtually no difficulty entailed (I finished it in three days, being totally enthralled), but it's a fascinating perspective on the history of Italian/western food as well as restaurant life, narrative delivery of recipes, and myriad other topics. (It does cover meat-related topics rather extensively and somewhat gruesomely, so vegetarians may be turned off.)
And Buford does manage to take it deeper than just storytelling in some places, like an indictment of the effect of globalization on the quality of food from an abnormal angle--that the problem started with "the customer is always right." I'll have to revisit his thoughts on that in order to see whether I actually buy it. Hell, I might even make a post about it, rare as that activity is.
Anyway, it's a totally fascinating book that I would recommend to anyone not especially squeamish toward vivid descriptions of the small-town butcher profession.
Part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is that I had come from reading several very difficult books and Heat is a purely pleasurable read with virtually no difficulty entailed (I finished it in three days, being totally enthralled), but it's a fascinating perspective on the history of Italian/western food as well as restaurant life, narrative delivery of recipes, and myriad other topics. (It does cover meat-related topics rather extensively and somewhat gruesomely, so vegetarians may be turned off.)
And Buford does manage to take it deeper than just storytelling in some places, like an indictment of the effect of globalization on the quality of food from an abnormal angle--that the problem started with "the customer is always right." I'll have to revisit his thoughts on that in order to see whether I actually buy it. Hell, I might even make a post about it, rare as that activity is.
Anyway, it's a totally fascinating book that I would recommend to anyone not especially squeamish toward vivid descriptions of the small-town butcher profession.