Stop Me Before I Blog Again!

.... but I am just sitting around waithing for Chas and Mary and I keep finding cool things like this interview with Bill Buford, who recently wrote of his experiences learning to be an Italian butcher in the New Yorker:

"One night Dario and I and my wife and his wife at the time went to a restaurant not far from Dario’s house. He looked at the menu and saw air-dried goose. He threw the menu down, he screamed, he shouted at the owner of the restaurant, he humiliated him in front of a party—a birthday party for some geriatrics who were up on the stage doing the Beach Boys in Italian. He just went berserk. To the restaurant proprietor, Filippo, he said, “Filippo, you have a beautiful panoramic view”—the restaurant was on top of a mountain—“of all of Tuscany. When in your life have you ever seen a goddam goose in that sky, ever?” And then he threw the menu down. “Cazzo! Cazzo!”

"In Italy, what you’re really learning is centuries of a culture of producing food in a particular region. As Mario Batali has said, these guys have been doing it pretty well for seven, eight, ten centuries—who’s to think you’re so smart that you can do it better? Here in America, it’s not so codified. One of the things that baffles the Italians who taught Mario is how Mario can be so successful when he does things like put raw eggs on top of his spaghetti carbonara. They were really perplexed. One of them said, “I’ve seen it! I’ve seen it with my own eyes—the eggs were raw! The eggs were raw!” "

(Snip)

"In the book, you make some observations about food and American culture."

"Utterly banal, obvious observations that the mass-marketing of food is killing it. What makes our food so plentiful has ruined what makes it interesting. Basically, if you can refrigerate it and ship it, then it’s ruined. What I learned from all these people in Italy—they’re all extreme in their traditionalism—is how to make food with your hands, and how the kind of food that you can make with your hands is going to be idiosyncratic, expressive, and unique to the place where you are. You’re trying to make food that’s unique to the place it comes from. That’s what it comes down to, in a nutshell. The closer the food is to the place, the more intense the flavors—more vibrant, more alive, more of the earth."

The book sounds good too--(the review is by Anthony Bourdain). It has been on my wish list for a week, and if the excerpt is anything to go by it is good enough that a resonably experienced cook can cook from it.

Hat tip Michael Blowhard.