Bill Buford. (2020). Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Bill Buford. 2020. Dirt: Adventures in Lyon As a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon As a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020.

Bill Buford. Dirt: Adventures in Lyon As a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020.

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   • bioText: Bill Buford is the author of Heat and Among the Thugs. He has received a Marshall Scholarship, a James Beard Award, and the Comune di Roma’s Premio Sandro Onofri for narrative reportage. For eighteen years, Buford lived in England, and was the founding editor of the literary magazine Granta and the founding publisher of Granta Books. He moved to the United States in 1995 to join The New Yorker, where he has been the fiction editor, a staff writer, and a regular contributor. In 2008, he moved with his family to Lyon, France, and lived there for five years. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, educated at University of California, Berkeley, and King’s College, Cambridge, and now lives in New York City with his wife, the wine educator and writer Jessica Green, and their twin sons.
   • name: Bill Buford

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title

Dirt

fullDescription

“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal
What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen.
With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Ruth Reichl, former editor of Gourmet and author of Save Me the Plums
   • content: "Pure pleasure. Masterfully written. If you care at all about food, about writing, about obsessive people with a sense of adventure, you have to read this book. It is, in a word, wonderful."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting
   • content: "Bill Buford is an enthusiast of the highest order. His deep dive into Lyonnais cuisine is a detective story, a love story, and an act of bare-knuckled reverence. It's earthy, brainy and delicious."
3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from March 9, 2020
     Buford (Heat) delivers a vivid and often laugh-out-loud account of the tribulations, humblings, and triumphs he and his family endured in the five years they lived in France. In the mid-aughts, Buford determines to move to France to learn about French cooking, and after much effort he, his wife, and their twin toddler boys arrive in Lyon, a city notable for “its gritty darkness, the sewage smells,” where it’s initially impossible for Buford to find a kitchen to work in. It isn’t until he does a stint at a cooking school that he finagles a spot in a Michelin-starred restaurant, where the work is relentless and the culture unreformed (an Indonesian cook, for instance, is given the name Jackie Chan). Meanwhile, Buford’s twin boys become fully French, and Buford puts on his culinary deerstalker cap to investigate the influence of Italian cooking on French cuisine, and vice versa. Buford’s a delightful narrator, and his stories of attending a pig slaughter, befriending the owner of a local bakery, and becoming gradually accepted by the locals are by turns funny, intimate, insightful, and occasionally heartbreaking. It’s a remarkable book, and even readers who don’t know a sabayon from a Sabatier will find it endlessly rewarding.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 15, 2020
     An American family revels in French culture and cuisine. Journalist and foodie Buford, a writer and editor for the New Yorker and former longtime editor of Granta, follows Heat (2006), his chronicle of cooking in Italy, with an ebullient, entertaining memoir of life in Lyon, where he, his wife, and two young sons settled so that he could indulge his desire to learn French cooking. Planning to stay six months, they wound up living in the city, renowned for its gastronomy, for several years, during which Buford worked for a baker, gained admission to an acclaimed cooking school, and toiled among the staff of a famous restaurant. The first months were difficult, he admits: "each member of our small family had come to doubt the wisdom of the project." But he and his sons learned French (the children more quickly than their father), the boys assimilated to school, and his wife pursued her ambition to earn a diploma as a wine expert. Buford honed his skills as a chef and enthusiastically steeped himself in the culture of the French kitchen, where apprentices suffer "unregulated bullying and humiliation." As the author demonstrates, French kitchens are no less hierarchical and combative than those in Italy, and nothing less than perfection is tolerated. It "was all about rules: that there was always one way and only one way" to peel asparagus, for example, devein goose livers, and construct puff pastry; that the three principles of a French plate are "color, volume, and texture"; and that the secret of glorious bread, meat, cheese, and wine is the soil. "What makes Lyonnais food exceptional," Buford writes, is "a chef's access to the nearby ingredients" from local farms, mountain lakes, and rivers. "Lyon," he adds, "is a geographical accident of good food and food practices." He describes in mouthwatering detail the many dishes he cooked and ate and the charming restaurants the family visited. A lively, passionate homage to fine food. (first printing of 125,000)

     COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from May 1, 2020
     

     Once you've mastered Italian cuisine, what's next? New Yorker writer Buford (Heat) recounts his time working for Mario Batali, and deciding to move--along with his wife and twin toddler sons--to Lyon, France. From a rocky start, which included missed flights and difficulty securing visas, Buford eventually found work in a local bakery, studied at L'Institut Bocuse, and navigated the hierarchy of the award-winning La M�re Brazier. But besides grueling days at the restaurant, Buford also spends time investigating the contentious history of French cuisine (could there be a connection with the Italian Medici daughters, who moved to France when they married?), and researching the seminal recipes of Brillat-Savarin. The author and his family remain in France for five years before returning to New York. VERDICT An often funny and eye-opening behind-the-scenes look at haute cuisine, as well as life as an expat in France. Readers will be engrossed not only by Buford's story, but that of his family as well.--Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

     Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from May 1, 2020
     Having learned his way around a Tuscan kitchen (Heat, 2006), Buford used his connections with American chefs to garner a novice's spot as cook in a French restaurant. He settles for nothing less than an apprenticeship in Lyon, esteemed as France's gastronomic capital. Uprooting his wife and twin sons from New York City in itself proves quite an accomplishment, dealing with an exacting bureaucracy to produce necessary visas, finding a place to live, and enrolling the boys in school. Cooking at La M�re Brazier and attending classes at L'Institut Bocuse, France's premier culinary school, proves daunting enough for the language barrier alone, but even more challenging to earn respect in the closed world of chefdom. Buford's fellow cooks are barely out of their teen years and not above physical violence when provoked. He delves into the controversial origins of French cuisine and restaurants, drawing unflinching portraits of past and present luminaries like culinary school founder Paul Bocuse himself. He pursues origins of dishes, sauces, and their ingredients, even participating in the stark grittiness of butchering a pig and learning that in France the best, most coveted flavors come from the earthiest animal organs. An inside look into haute cuisine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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“You can almost taste the food in Bill Buford’s Dirt, an engrossing, beautifully written memoir about his life as a cook in France.” —The Wall Street Journal
What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon’s best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen.
With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written...

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