The first cut is the deepest

IN the middle of his life’s journey, on a blazingly hot summer day, Bill Buford was riding a scooter through Greenwich Village with a freshly slaughtered 225-pound pig strapped to the rack. Its hoofs were dangling to one side, the pig’s head to the other. Shoppers at a greenmarket shot him hostile looks as he puttered by, but Buford’s biggest problem was logistical. Blood was beginning to pool in the clear plastic sheets covering the pig. How would he fit the carcass into his building’s small elevator? “I just had to do this,” Buford explained. (In the end, he and the pig managed to squeeze in.)

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.

Buford had no intention of returning to America. In 1990 he wrote his first book, “Among the Thugs,” a highly praised journey into the world of English soccer hooligans. His London ties seemed stronger than ever. But when then-New Yorker editor Tina Brown asked him to revamp the fiction pages in 1994, he grabbed the opportunity. He quickly put his own imprint on things, publishing work by up-and-comers like Dave Eggers and Jhumpa Lahiri and taking heat for moving New Yorker fiction into more risque territory.

“I ended up running a lot of stories characterized by explicit sexual content,” Buford said. “With nonfiction assignments, you can pick your story and writer, and it’s more directed. But with fiction, you’ve really got to wait and listen to what the culture is doing. There was a moment when Nicholson Baker and others had a graphicness about sexuality.... That’s what the kids were doing.”

He also brought in well-known writers who had not been considered New Yorker types. “Philip Roth was really difficult,” Buford said. “He had been rejected so many times by the New Yorker, he couldn’t believe that, finally, the New Yorker wanted to publish him. ...I called him, and he was skeptical and testy.”

All in all, it was a good time, said Buford, who has just begun an assignment writing a food column for the weekly. “And then this whole thing with Mario came along without warning. Life is busy, it’s an excuse. But I was ready for a change.”

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All aboard

ON a cool spring afternoon, Buford was riding an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C., where he was slated to begin promoting his new book at BookExpo America, the nation’s largest book publishing convention. Later that evening, he would attend a champagne reception and dinner party thrown by his publisher in the Corcoran Art Gallery, with John Updike, Richard Ford, Nora Ephron and other authors in attendance. Hours before changing into a dark blue suit, Buford, a burly man with graying hair, seemed more at ease in a blue work shirt and jeans. He swigged bottles of water as the train rumbled down the tracks.

It didn’t take much to get him rolling with a stream of barbed recollections. . Batali’s tortellini “are not very good,” he said, because his hands are immense and the production of such pasta requires a delicate touch. Tina Brown was “oblivious to cuisine,” and the catered food he ate at dinner parties in her Upper East Side Manhattan apartment was “easily some of the worst I ever put in my mouth.” Batali “is bigger than Emeril [Lagasse] now,” he added, because “Mario is a real chef. Emeril, I’m not so sure.”

Buford, whose eyes narrow wickedly when he laughs, was equally harsh on himself, especially when describing the not-so-lofty origins of his new book.

“The whole story began with a spectacularly ridiculous affair,” he chuckled, recounting the birthday party he had thrown in his home for author Jay McInerney. On an impulse, Buford invited Batali, a friend of the novelist; he made plans to serve an ambitious meal, including grilled lamb and pastries with wild mushrooms.

But the food was a disaster. Batali minced no words upon his arrival, calling Buford “a moron” for placing the cooked meat in tin foil (the lamb continues to cook in the foil, he explained). The stocky, red-headed chef quickly pushed his host aside and took over the cooking. With a flourish, he put pieces of lardo -- cured pork fat -- on guests’ tongues. He drank five bottles of wine, danced with all the women and ended the party at 2:30 a.m. by playing air guitar to Neil Young’s “Southern Man.”

Buford was smitten. Weeks later he began reporting his profile of Batali, also a bestselling author and a well-known TV personality on the Food Network.

“I could never learn enough,” Buford said, recalling his initial stint at Babbo. “Chefs have an inside knowledge the rest of us never get. You can’t learn anything by cooking fava beans two times a year or making roast chicken every three weeks.”

Batali had misgivings when Buford approached him about spending even more time in the restaurant. But he agreed to bring the writer into his kitchen as an “indentured slave,” working long hours for no salary. On several occasions, the chef had harsh words for his blundering student: “Writer guy! Busted!” he barked when Buford was about to throw away bags of unused celery leaves that could be used to prepare other dishes. He got a tongue-lashing when Batali caught him sending a plate of undercooked pork to a customer. It took months before the apprentice won praise.

But by then he was moving on to Tuscany, and an even bigger adventure.

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Hazardous duty

IT wasn’t the grueling work in Italy that transformed him, Buford said, as the train rolled through Philadelphia. Nor was it a series of kitchen accidents, like the times he cut his hand badly, fell headlong into a pile of meat and garlic peels, or set himself on fire. It certainly wasn’t the night that a besotted Dario commanded Buford to go home and make love to his wife: “You must enact the dark acts of carnality, a butcher’s carnality,” Dario shouted. “And then you will rise in the hours before dawn, smelling of carnality and unload the meat from the truck, like a butcher.” (“I did the best I could,” Buford said. “I didn’t want to let the guild down.”)

The pivotal moment came when the author realized that, despite their bizarre behavior, Cecchini and others were trying to turn back the clock -- fighting against the inexorable degradation of food and the way it is prepared in the modern world. They saw themselves as the guardians of a dying order, denouncing the restaurateurs who use cheap ingredients, the farmers who grow vegetables tainted with chemicals, the cattlemen who raise cheap beef riddled with fat, and the customers who don’t care.

“Ultimately, the two worlds of Tuscany and New York could not have been more different,” Buford said. To be sure, the restaurants he patronized in Italy were driven by business pressures. But most served an average of 60 people each night, and the act of dining could be an enriching, even leisurely experience. At Babbo, he noted, owners grappled with relentless pressures to serve 300 to 350 diners every night.

Cecchini once threw a tantrum in a rival’s restaurant, denouncing the food as bogus. He couldn’t have cared less what others thought. At Babbo, Buford said, the staff had a collective panic attack when it learned that a new critic for the New York Times, Frank Bruni, was writing a review and had eaten in the restaurant several times without anyone’s knowledge.

Buford praised Batali for his integrity and devotion to Italian tradition. But the author conceded that his zany Tuscan mentors and their unyielding standards made New York City’s frantic culinary scene look trivial and superficial by comparison.

“Manhattan is a money city, top to bottom,” he said. “It’s a city of restaurants and chefs, it’s a place where people eat out and don’t cook at home. It’s become the epitome of the celebrity food culture that’s very much alive in America today.”

Nowadays, Buford and his wife, Jessica, aren’t spending many hours in chic New York nightspots. They have twin 8-month-old boys, and Dad says he’s been spending most nights at home, learning how to cook baby food. .

Food, Buford said, “is a concentrated messenger of a culture,” the reflection of social history and values. But it’s also just meat on a plate -- no matter how you cut it.

As passions flared among rival chefs in Tuscany, he noted, “these guys were talking about food like it was life and death. Like it was worth dying for and getting into fights about. But at the end of the day, it’s lunch. You eat it and it’s gone.”

Forget the media sniping over who has the hottest restaurant in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, he said. Ignore a Tuscan’s chest-beating insistence that bistecca florentina, properly prepared, is the equivalent of a Da Vinci painting.

“Food is all of these things and, ultimately, none of them,” Buford said. “But it has this very powerful charisma for us. It makes for a very elusive kind of romance.”

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Buford will appear at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena to discuss “Heat” at 7 p.m. Friday.