His wife, a wine expert, was working toward a degree. His kids were at the local public school. But he wasn't about to leave - he'd invested a lot in this adventure, and had a book to write. "American kitchens can be very rough, and they can be very misogynistic, and they can be very crude, but nothing was like what I was seeing in a French kitchen," he said.įrench kitchens are based on a system called the Brigade de cuisine, modeled after military hierarchy, which Buford says tolerates bullies. It doesn't reflect well on me."īuford said that kind of hazing was almost expected in ambitious French kitchens. "And I didn't and I regret that I didn't. "Here is an act of great brutality and bullying and immorality," he recalled.
He told me that whether it was because he was a journalist and there to observe, or because he was being hazed himself, he didn't intervene.
Other people in the kitchen had it even worse: a young female cook angered the sous chef so much he threw pans at her head. The bully ordered Buford around, sabotaged his dishes, hid pots and pans and stole ingredients from his station. We stuffed the chickens inside the pig bladder, tied them up and set them afloat in a pot of boiling water, then sliced them open. And they don't like outsiders," Buford said. a big city but it's also very provincial. They'd planned to go to Lyon, France after their time in Italy, but with toddlers in tow, it took a while. In that decade and a half, Buford and his wife had twin boys. Now, 15 years later, the next chapter in Buford's story has arrived in his new memoir Dirt. For people who fantasized about doing something similar, Heat became a kind of Bible. Buford ended up quitting his magazine job to move to Italy to continue learning. It began as an assignment for The New Yorker where he apprenticed in a restaurant kitchen. Then, in 2006 he wrote a book called Heat.
(We'll get back to the pig bladder shortly, I promise.) He was an editor at prominent literary magazines. I tried not to laugh as he evaded the details and then disappeared upstairs for more ingredients.īuford has been a character in my head for years. "I think it arrived in a DHL parcel labeled 'Documents,'" he told me.
It was the dried-out bladder of a pig.īuford was a little sketchy about the specifics, like who he got it from. Inside was what looked like a deflated, veiny football, wrapped loosely in plastic. In Dirt, Bill Buford describes pig bladders as being like a small rubber sock - just insert chicken!Ī few weeks ago, standing outside his New York City apartment building, Bill Buford handed me a bag. Poulet en Vessie is chicken cooked in a pig's bladder.
0 kommentar(er)
