Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

by Bill Buford

  Eventually I mastered the squishing technique. I also discovered that after you’ve made a couple thousand or so of these little ears, your mind wanders. You think about anything, everything, whatever, nothing. Such moments illustrate what is referred to as the Zen of making pasta, which is also a way of saying that making pasta can be very boring. I was rather earnest during this phase, so I found that when my mind wandered it tended not to stray too far from the matter at hand. Why, it asked, would anyone want to eat a thing that looks like a squashed ear? So I studied each one and thought hard about its shape. The explanation I came up with involved belly buttons. As with belly buttons, I concluded, there are two kinds of pasta: innies and outies. The innies, like ravioli and tortelli, are designed to surprise you with goodies inside: you bite and discover a juicy something previously hidden from view. The outies are designed to “hold on to” the goodies from the outside. People like to eat orecchiette because they retain a tiny cup of sauce in their ears, I decided, while ingeniously holding on to a little more on the bottom, along the ridges.

  Having arrived at this illuminating philosophical distinction, I felt it was appropriate that making innies should be my next task. These were what I really wanted to make. (Miriam’s tortelli di zucca were innies.) I had tried to produce my own batch once—a long-ago dinner party, another failure—which might have accounted for my overzealous interest in them. I don’t know why I’d thought I could make a fresh pasta—some cookbook must have made it seem easy. Friends arrived and found me in the kitchen—a pot of boiling water fogging up the windows, walls dripping from the wetness—pleading with twelve porcini-filled ravioli to hold their shape. They were my first efforts, and after I’d put them on a wire rack their doughy casings melted and disappeared, vanishing into the humid air, until only mushroomy mounds remained, lodged in the gaps of the wire mesh.

  Babbo’s innies had a variety of exotic names, although I now knew that fundamentally they were all just different kinds of ravioli. Mario’s version of Miriam’s tortelli di zucca, for instance (which he filled with butternut squash instead of pumpkin), were cut into circles and called lune. Another pasta, one filled with dried cod, were called mezzalune: so named because they were folded over like half-moons. There were also “love letters,” with sweet peas and mint, shaped to look like air-mail-sticker-size rectangles with zigzaggy ends. (The name was a poeticized mutation of a pasta called francobolli, or postage stamps.) In fact, there were so many exotic names and weird shapes that I need to pause for a moment and indulge in a bit of cultural speculation. Postage stamps, half-moons, moons, little ears, belly buttons: what exactly is going on? Or put another way: What other country serves up its national cuisine in the form of little toys? And what does that tell us, that Italians seem always to have been playing with their food? When you make tortelli, the thirteenth-century Liber de coquina says—and with such unrestrained glee that you’re left to conclude that this food-as-a-plaything situation has been a feature of the Italian meal for a very long time—you can shape the dough into “horseshoes or brooches or rings, the letters of the alphabet, or any animal you can imagine.” Is the secret appeal of pasta, the world’s greatest comfort food, in its evocation of childhood? Must an Italian dinner always include a version of animal crackers? Pasta intimidated me. There was a mystery to it that I wasn’t fathoming—the secrets of a nation’s romper room, a too-intimate history of meddling madonnas. And, frankly, if I couldn’t recognize all these shapes (I mean, really—belly buttons? postage stamps?), how would I ever learn to prepare them?

  Today I feel more sanguine about the prospect, if only because I’ve come to suspect that Italians don’t know all the shapes either. Even if you’ve grown up eating bow ties, guitar strings, and pens, you never learn all the pastas, because there are too many—hundreds, according to Amelia Giarmoleo, the curator of Italy’s national pasta museum in Rome, the Museo Nazionale delle Paste Alimentari, where you can lose yourself for several hours marveling at centuries of food toys, exhibited like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s collection. But there is a basic pasta vocabulary—that’s what most Italians master—which allows them to interpret all the variations they encounter for the rest of their lives. (“Oh, I get it, it’s like penne, but gigantic and with ridges.”) And, if nothing else, I was determined to learn the essential lexicon.

  THE SAUCE that an outie clings to is a wholly different branch of philosophy. Usually this will be a ragù, and I’ll be honest in this matter: until I started working at Babbo, I didn’t really know what a ragù was, except that I’d seen unappetizing jars of it on supermarket shelves. I’d had no idea it was such a serious business.

  An Italian ragù and a French ragout are more or less the same thing. In any language, the process involves taking a piece of meat and, as it was described to me in the vernacular of the kitchen, cooking the shit out of the fucker. Both the term and the technique, I’ve since discovered, are at the heart of a centuries-long debate between advocates of French cooking and those of Italian in the we-were-there-first stakes. The rivalry, felt more acutely by the Italians, who believe they are seen by the French as a tribe of amusing primitives, might be summarized thus: In the history of European cooking, the Italian peninsula was first to establish a sophisticated high cuisine, starting with Maestro Martino in the fifteenth century. Then, Italians claim, their secrets were packed up and transported over the Alps by Caterina de’ Medici when, in 1533, she married the man who became Henry II of France.

  Afterwards, France underwent its own cooking renaissance, culminating in the post–ancien régime Olympian dining events of Antonin Carême—elaborate aspics, all-day sauces, architectural desserts—while Italians, having concluded that the New World fruit known to us as the tomato wasn’t poisonous after all and even had promise as a sauce, sank into a two-hundred-and-fifty-year culinary depression and, in outright violation of their chauvinistic character, started imitating the French. All those alla constructions—risotto alla Milanese, pollo alla cacciatora, bucatini all’amatriciana—are the Italian equivalent of the French à la and arose out of a nervous effort to sound fancy. Other food words changed, too, including sugo, which became a ragù. In 1903, the now very grand cuisine of France was codified encyclopedically in Auguste Escoffier’s Guide culinaire, which remains the seminal text of the “classical” approach. The seminal text in Italy, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (“The Science of the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well”), written at the same time, was a bunch of home recipes gathered by a textile merchant named Pellegrino Artusi. Escoffier, drawing on his experience as head chef of the grand hotels, tells you the two hundred ways to make a sauce. Artusi, drawing on letters from country housewives, tells you about belly buttons and tortellini. 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.

  Fundamentally, a ragù is an equation involving a solid (meat) and a liquid (broth or wine), plus a slow heat, until you reach a result that is neither solid nor liquid. The most famous ragù is a Bolognese, although there is not one Bolognese but many. Gianni Valdiserri confessed to me when I was in Porretta that when he and Betta married—Betta pregnant, sixteen years old, and still in school—he was concerned that, in their hurry, he hadn’t tasted her ragù. This ragù, which she’d learned from an aunt, had been passed down through many generations of her family and would be different from the ragù that Gianni had grown up eating, his mother’s, which was profound and complex and touched something deep in his soul. He also knew that he’d never be able to teach Betta to make someone else’s. A ragù, he said, was a very personal thing. So imagine his happiness when he first ate a ragù made by Betta and discovered that, yes, it was different from his mother’s—and better.

  A Bolognese is made with a medieval kitchen’s quirky sense of ostentation and flavorings. There are at least two
meats (beef and pork, although local variations can insist on veal instead of beef, prosciutto instead of pork, and sometimes prosciutto, pancetta, sausage, and pork, not to mention capon, turkey, or chicken livers) and three liquids (milk, wine, and broth), and either tomatoes (if your family recipe is modern) or no tomatoes (if the family recipe is older than Columbus), plus nutmeg, sometimes cinnamon, and whatever else your great-great-great-grandmother said was essential. (The only meat in Miriam’s, for instance, is sausage, cooked slowly with butter and oil, plus her own homemade tomato sauce and the slightest hint of garlic: one clove, removed before the cooking is completed.) In any variation, the result is a texture characteristic of all ragù: a crumbly stickiness, a condition of being neither solid nor liquid, more dry than wet, a dressing more than a sauce or, as Mario describes it, a “condiment,” a term he uses for his American staff to emphasize that what a pasta is served with is—like ketchup on a hot dog—never more important than the pasta itself. (And yet still very important: Gianni speaks of the erotics of a new ragù as it cooks, filling the house with its perfume, a promise of an appetite that will mount until it’s satisfied. Actually, what he said was the cooking of a fresh ragù mi da libidine—gives him a hard-on—and until he can eat some he walks around in a condition of high arousal.)

  According to Betta, the Bolognese ragù made at Babbo is incomplete, which I suppose she should know since she taught Mario how to make it. “There’s no prosciutto!” she told me, appalled, when I asked her about the dinner she and Gianni had eaten there on their first trip to New York in 1998—a criticism that, when I repeated it to Mario, astonished him: “She could tell that from eating it one time!” The prosciuttoless ragù is served with pappardelle, a long flat noodle made (Betta also observed, even more horrified) “with a machine.” None of this, frankly, meant a lot to me when finally I was allowed to work at the pasta station. What mattered was that pappardelle (“Pap!”) was the easiest order to do, if only because there wasn’t a lot that could go wrong. I put two scoops of ragù in a pan and added water, a dollop of uncooked tomatoes, and some butter—that was it. When the dish was done, I sprinkled on cheese and parsley (referred to as “chiff,” for chiffonnade, to describe the feathery way it had been chopped). In fact, all the ragù dishes were fairly straightforward. The gnocchi (“Ox!”) was served with an oxtail ragù (a stringy beef stew), the love letters (“Love!”) with a lamb sausage ragù, and the orecchiette (“Ork!”) with a pork sausage ragù plus a tongful of broccoli rabe.

  From the start, the station was a test of the mind’s capacity to hold many things in place without ever having to think about them. There was a cheat sheet taped to the wall. Evidently, everyone needs a cheat sheet at first, a reassuring thing to discover, and looking at this one—a page of once yellow legal paper rendered into a greasy transparency by some wild olive oil moment—I was relieved to see that my predecessor had been just as clueless as me. The ingredients for each dish were written out with a blunt pencil, along with crude diagrams. Two concentric circles illustrated the hollow bucatini, for instance (buco means “hole”; bucatini, “little holes”). A flattish oblong was linguine (lingua means “tongue,” and linguine means “little tongues”). The chitarra was a thick, rough line, like the bass string of a guitar. Most were misspelled phonetic approximations. “Ork” was orecchiette, although no person, learning the station, would have known the word orecchiette, mainly because it was never used. What you heard was “ork,” and you never saw a written version, because, unlike every other station, where ticker-tape printouts were tacked up along a shelf just above eye level, this one had no place to stick the little slips of paper, which would have wilted in the steam and fallen off. Besides, the orders came so fast you had no choice but to keep them in your head, however they happened to be spelled when you put them there.

  The problem was the variations. To rehydrate the oxtail ragù, you added water and a half scoop of uncooked tomatoes—just as you did with the Bolognese—but no butter. Also, although you sprinkled cheese and parsley on at the end, the parsley was whole leaves, rather than the chopped-up feathery kind. Why? I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. To fuck with my head—that’s why. And to the lamb sausage ragù that went with the love letters you added a little water and butter, just like the Bolognese, but this time no tomato, although you then finished it with cheese, like the others, but with mint leaves rather than parsley—after all, the love letters were stuffed with mint and peas. What didn’t make sense was the red chili flakes: you were meant to add these, too. Can you imagine—chili flakes in your love letters?

  “There’s no chili in your love letters,” Frankie said to me. It was Andy’s day off, and Frankie was the expediter. He had tasted the ragù with his finger after the dish was plated but allowed a runner to carry it into the dining room anyway, because it was going out with three other dishes and there was no time to prepare a new one without holding up the whole table. But he wasn’t happy. “How could you fucking forget the chili—again?”

  I turned to Mark. “How could I fucking forget the chili again?”

  He looked at me flatly. “I’ve got no idea how you could fucking forget the chili again.”

  The station wasn’t easy. The kitchen counts on its running smoothly, and there wasn’t the luxury of having a journalist-tourist, infatuated with the mystique of what he kept referring to as pasta fresca, unless he was never going to make a mistake. It could be tense. “Did I just burn you?” Frankie asked one night when he was sautéing a pan of soft-shell crabs, which swell up in the heat until they explode, hurling water and hot oil in unpredictable directions. And before I could formulate a witty reply he said, “Good,” and then emptied the leftover oil in his frying pan with such violence that it splattered on the floor and me, burning me again.

  A FILLED PASTA is usually not served with a ragù because the pasta itself is a vehicle for ragù. (In the belly button dichotomy, it’s an innie.) What you put on the outside to dress it was, therefore, very simple—usually a butter sauce. When Mario was in the kitchen, he called for small amounts of butter in the butter sauces and was always telling the guy at the pasta station to use less. When Mario was not in the kitchen, Andy called for immoderate quantities and was always telling the pasta guy to use more. (Once I protested until Mark shushed me. “Never challenge the person in charge, especially when he’s wrong, or he’ll make your life hell. He’ll pile on more orders than you can handle. He’ll find fault with everything. He’ll make you redo dishes that were cooked perfectly the first time.”)

  A butter sauce is an emulsion. “Emulsion” was another term I incompletely understood, although I knew enough to know that I was creating one when I added butter to broth to make a meat sauce at home. In French cookbooks, this was a tricky moment, and great stress was put on everything being exactly right: the broth very hot, the butter very chilled and cut into very small bits, to be incorporated, one by one, into the broth with very steady whisking. The fear was that the emulsion might “break up” (whatever that meant). It’s different in a restaurant: there you seem to be doing so many things, one after the other, that the thought never occurs to you that one might be trickier than another.

  This is what happens. You’re told to prepare an order of tortelloni (“Tort!”). You drop eight pieces into a basket bobbing in boiling water. Fresh pasta is less fussy than dried, and the cooking objective is different: none of this al dente business. You want a food that’s soft and yielding rather than one that resists your bite. For the tortelloni, that’s about three minutes, but you can leave them in for much longer. To prepare the sauce, you take a pan (from a shelf above your head), scoop out some butter (from a container against the wall), and plop it in. As at all stations, your hope is never to move your feet. You then tilt the pan over the pasta machine and scoop up some of the hot water. This was something of a finesse movement: dipping the trowel part of the tongs into the boiling water and flicking it so it landed in the pan and not o
n your forearm—which, of course, was where mine regularly arrived, causing it to swell with red welts, unless I missed altogether. I got Mark more than once, startling him every time.

  Next, you add a flavor, an herb or citrus: orange zest for the tortelloni (or five sage leaves for the lune, or five scallions for the mezzelune—something strong but simple). You take the pan, which now looks pretty disgusting—a pool of cloudy pasta water, a lump of butter melting along the rim, some desiccated orangey twigs—and put it on the flattop and swirl. You check the basket in the pasta cooker: a few tortelloni have risen. You go back to the pan and swirl it. The contents have changed. With the heat and the pan movement, they are a yellow-orange soup (yellowish from the butter, orange-ish from the zest). You recheck your basket: the tortelloni are floating. You go back to the pan and swirl it again—almost ready, looking like a custard. But three more orders come in, you deal with them, and by the time you get back to the pan, just thirty seconds later, the liquid is mottled: still a sauce but a diseased one, very ugly, not something you want to eat. It is now broken. To fix it, you give the pan another tong flick of water (or perhaps a few tong flicks, until one lands) and return it to the flattop, and with one miraculous swirl the mottled texture melts away.

  This is an emulsion: an agreement between two unlike elements (butter and water), achieved by heat and motion. If you get it slightly wrong—as when the sauce starts to dry out, destroying the balance between the fat and the liquid—the unlike elements pull apart and break up. Sometimes, during slow moments, I deliberately let my sauce get ugly, so I could witness its snapping back into condition with a small flick of water, like an animated chemistry lesson. Once, I was caught in mid-reverie.

  I was making a mushroom sauce that illustrated two things that were characteristic of the station: how to use heat and how to stop it. Like most sauces, this one was prepared in two stages and used only a few ingredients: mushrooms (yellowfeet, although any wild mushroom works), some fresh thyme leaves, a finely chopped shallot, a little butter. To begin, you needed lots of heat. You put your pan on the flattop until it got really hot, until it darkened, until it seemed as though it might start melting, and then you splashed it with olive oil—the pan went smoky very quickly—followed by the mushrooms. Then: nothing. You didn’t move the pan until you detected the sweet wood smoke smell of the mushrooms caramelizing. The mushrooms now had a crunchy, sugary crust, not burned but on the verge of burning. You sprinkled the pan with the shallots and thyme, held it until they reacted to the high heat, and then shoveled in enough pasta water to stop the cooking: the pan hissed, steamed, and went quiet. That was Stage One: from high heat to no heat. Stage Two was when the order was fired. You retrieved the pan and made an emulsion: the butter, the swirling-swirling routine, until the mushroom water became a sauce sticky enough to adhere to a pasta.