The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen
Earlier this month I caught a rebroadcast of a radio interview with writer Frederick Kaufman in which he discussed his now notorious 2005 Harper’s essay “Debbie Does Salad.” In the magazine Kaufman and erotic photographer Barbara Nitke compared the conventions of Food Network shows–wet, steamy close-ups, rhythmic, repetitive editing, the “money shot” of the host slicing into the perfect pie–to those of the adult film industry. On the radio Kaufman went even further, arguing that the hit show Iron Chef could be read as classic fetish porn, a highly codified transformation narrative in which the main character–in this case the main ingredient, like squid–is changed from its ugly and pedestrian self into an object of beauty and desire.
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This hilariously overwrought bit brought to mind two books that came out a few months back to a fair amount of acclaim: Michael Ruhlman’s The Reach of a Chef and Bill Buford’s Heat, both first-person examinations of America’s exploding food culture. Ruhlman’s book is the third in an informal series. The first, The Making of a Chef (1997), is his account of a year or so in the life of the country’s preeminent cooking school, the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. The Soul of a Chef (1999) examines the ideal of culinary perfection from three very different perspectives; it was the book that got me hooked on food writing.
The former fiction editor of the New Yorker and the founding editor of Granta, Buford ditched the life of letters in his late 40s to apprentice himself to Batali and, later, the “Dante-quoting butcher” of the book’s subtitle. (Or at least he appeared to ditch it–in reality he first secured himself a plum book deal.) His story gallops from the kitchen at Babbo, Batali’s NYC stronghold, to the studios of the Food Network to the fiefdoms of mercurial eccentrics in England (notoriously foulmouthed chef Marco Pierre White) and Italy (the aforementioned butcher).
