Strangers lent him knives hardly more willingly than they would have donated him kidneys. He hadn't understood that knives were not regarded as kitchen equipment, but more or less part of the cook's body. When he first turned up for work at Babbo, Buford didn't bring his own knives, much to the annoyance of his new colleagues. Buford's obsession with food and its preparation is genuine, but writers' obsessions are always canny and a book contract makes a useful safety net. She is referred to from time to time as being with him in Italy, but it seems unlikely that she chucked in her editorial job in New York to join the hunt for the perfect bistecca fiorentina. His wife was dismayed when Buford later proposed to move to Italy to cut up animals, but the details of the accommodation they reached aren't clear. Buford gives a muffled impression of midlife crisis: if, as he says, he was tired of all the sitting involved in his previous life as a magazine editor, he could have splashed out on a lectern. At some stage, this mutated into the desire to work for Batali at his three-star restaurant, Babbo. It requires patience, determination and a certain amount of masochism.īuford started out by writing a profile of New York chef Mario Batali for the New Yorker. This approach, like method acting (with which it has points in common), tends to be American. To find out about professional sports from inside, Plimpton would train and even play with a team. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.By existential journalism, I mean the total-immersion method pioneered by George Plimpton in the Fifties.

Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I’m back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can’t hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss.

I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of pasta, each movement like the last one. I let it dry if I’m making tagliatelle I keep it damp if I’m making tortellini. I’ve learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I follow her formula for the dough-an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn’t look wet enough. Betta’s tortellini are now in my head and my hands. “For my part, I’d come for the textbook and was glad to have it.

Bill buford author