Adam Begley

French lessons, with tears: inside a Lyonnais kitchen

Bill Buford masters the art of French cooking the hard way — including slaughtering a pig for boudin noir

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You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration of Italian gastronomy, Bill Buford announced that he would be crossing the Alps: ‘I have to go to France.’ And here he is, in Dirt, another rollicking, food-stuffed entertainment, determined to unearth, as it were, the secrets of haute cuisine. Lyon, being the gastronomic capital of France, is where he decides to dig in, having uprooted his family (wife, twin toddlers) to facilitate his investigations. Gourmets and gourmands will savour this account of his five-year adventure — and so will students of the author’s curious, compelling character.

Famous in literary circles for having revived Granta in the 1980s, and for giving ‘dirty realism’ its name, Buford was for seven years, starting in 1995, the fiction editor of the New Yorker — but literature, it’s now abundantly clear, was just one facet of his career. He has an impressive track record as a participatory journalist in the vein of the late George Plimpton (also famous in literary circles, also a magazine editor, at the Paris Review, which he co-founded). Plimpton plunged serially into professional sports — baseball, American football, boxing — and wrote droll, bestselling accounts of his bruising, exhilarating experiences. Buford’s first book, published 30 years ago, was Among the Thugs, the story of his willing immersion in the culture of English football hooliganism. In 2006 he published Heat, which featured his gruelling stint as a ‘slave’ in the kitchen of Babbo, a three-star Italian restaurant in New York. Dirt is essentially a sequel — different language, different cuisine, different cast of characters, same hideous working conditions, same utter absorption in the making of food.

Once described by Robert McCrum as a ‘professional naughty boy’, Buford is powerfully drawn to bad behaviour — hence his obsession with Mario Batali, the manically appetitive owner of Babbo and hero of Heat, whose career as a celebrity chef was effectively ended by accusations of sexual harassment levelled a decade after the book’s publication.

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