The first cut is the deepest

Two years earlier, in summer 2002, Buford was comfortably settled in his job as fiction editor at the New Yorker magazine. His life was stimulating and seemed stable. Then it fell apart, like a bad souffle. A passionate food maven, Buford had just written a two-part profile for the New Yorker of celebrity chef Mario Batali, taking readers behind the scenes of his ultra-hot Babbo restaurant here. The editor-turned-reporter, then in his mid-40s, worked in the kitchen for three months as a line cook, pasta chef and grill man. He had been hungry to learn about high cuisine and assumed that his culinary midlife crisis would now begin to cool down. But it got only worse.

Quitting his day job, Buford decided to write a book about Babbo. He spent 14 more months with Batali. Then he grew restless and moved with his wife to Tuscany, apprenticing himself to a charismatic and eccentric butcher. At their first meeting, Dario Cecchini greeted Buford with a booming recitation from the opening of Dante's "Divine Comedy," which Buford translates as "Midway through the road of life, I found myself in a dark wood, on a lost road." Was he also lost, Buford wondered about himself?

Indeed, not too many people would have walked out on his job at the New Yorker. Few would have traded such cachet -- rubbing shoulders with writers and influencing the national literary conversation -- for a set of perilous kitchen knives. "These all turned out to be exhilarating experiences," said Buford, now 51, who has chronicled his odyssey in "Heat (An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany)," just published by Alfred A. Knopf. "Before this happened, I was on the outside looking in. But now I'm a participant. I feel like I'm part of a culinary tradition."

Buford's book offers yet another insider's glimpse of the restaurant business, a thriving genre previously explored by Anthony Bourdain in "Kitchen Confidential," Michael Ruhlman in "The Soul of a Chef" and others. But unlike them, Buford cheerfully concedes his ignorance. In its most revealing moments, "Heat" recounts the daily humiliation of trying to fit into a culture that is deeply skeptical of wannabes.

"There are not too many moments in an adult's life when you can throw yourself into learning," Buford said. "That's often regarded as a youthful experience. For me, this chance to participate in the life of a restaurant, firsthand, was a rare opportunity."

It wasn't the first time he left a familiar world behind to take on a difficult challenge. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, Buford became fascinated by literature relatively late, as a student at UC Berkeley, and he won a Marshall scholarship to study Shakespeare at Cambridge. There, with a friend, he took over the editorship of a struggling student publication called Granta. Some 16 years later, it had become one of the premier magazines for new fiction and nonfiction in the English-speaking world.