Pressure cooker

WHEN he was in his late 40s, Bill Buford, founding editor of Granta magazine, author of "Among the Thugs" (a book about soccer hooliganism) and former fiction editor of the New Yorker (where he is now a staff writer), went to Italy to apprentice himself to Tuscany's most famous butcher, Dario Cecchini. Buford arrived in the remote hill town of Panzano on a Sunday afternoon and found the butcher shop full of customers drinking and eating free samples of pig fat. His mentor-to-be spotted him in the crowd and immediately began intoning Dante: "Midway through the road of life, I found myself in a dark wood, on a lost road."

This butcher knew a midlife crisis when he saw one.

"Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany" is the literary outcome of Buford's vertical plunge into the world of professional cooking and food writing. Exuberant, hilarious, glorying in its rich and arcane subject matter, "Heat" is Plimpton-esque immersion journalism -- an amateur bumbling among the adepts -- but it also has much in common with spiritual autobiography, especially that genre in which the student's epiphanies are generously interspersed with drudgery, abasement and humiliation at the hands of mercurial, possibly crazy gurus.

Buford's Virgil on his journey is Mario Batali, a.k.a. Molto Mario of Food Network fame, the red-haired cooking genius of superhuman appetites. Five or six years ago -- the book's chronology is annoyingly murky -- Buford, an amateur but enthusiastic home cook, had invited Batali to his home for dinner and concluded "that he was an insane, eccentric wild man ... that is, a perfect subject for a New Yorker profile."

Unable to find a writer for the profile -- one somehow doubts he tried all that hard -- Buford took on the task. "I ... suspected, correctly, that I might be able to use the assignment to get into Mario's kitchen." Indeed, he worked in the kitchen at Babbo, Batali's flagship Italian restaurant in Manhattan, for six months. The two-part Batali profile appeared in August 2002; two months later, haunted by the fact that he'd been on the verge of discovering something "about food, about myself," Buford left his desk job and returned to the Babbo kitchen -- thus going from "a day spent sitting down to one spent standing up," to learn "a knowledge not found in books."