Heat by Bill Buford Read Free Book Online

she’d give me a cup of hot chocolate or a piece of meat. “Wow! Thank you!” If she was preparing skirt steak for the evening—the cheap cut from the belly or “skirt” of the cow, needing to be cut thin and cooked hot and fast—she might keep back a few strips, season them aggressively, throw them onto the flattop, and put them out on a platter. (A flattop is a flat piece of steel that sits atop the gas burners of an oven—welded on, so little heat escapes: you can crowd more things onto a flattop than a conventional stove, and it gets very hot—a skirt steak cooks in seconds.) Once she boned a turkey and rolled it up with dandelion greens and goat cheese. Her dishes were high in protein and very salty. When making them, she got a slightly distracted look, as if a tune were playing in her head. These moments seemed important and were the only times Elisa relaxed. She didn’t smile—she never got that comfortable—but you could tell that she was thinking of smiling.
    Making food seemed to be something everyone needed to do: not for the restaurant, but for the kitchen. There was the family meal, of course—bountifully served around four in the afternoon—but food was almost always being made by someone at some time all day long. The practice seemed to illustrate a principle I was always hearing referred to as “cooking with love.” A dish was a failure because it hadn’t been cooked with love. A dish was a success because the love was so obvious. If you’re cooking with love, every plate is a unique event—you never allow yourself to forget that a person is waiting to eat it: your food, made with your hands, arranged with your fingers, tasted with your tongue.
    One Saturday, when neither Andy nor Elisa was around, Memo took me aside again. “Let me show you how to cook with love.” He suddenly wanted to make an impromptu family supper. He’d found some beef tongues in the walk-in, which I suspect had been intended for a special: no matter, they were his now. He poached them, grilled them, and sliced them, then mixed the meat in a bowl with his own spicy hot sauce. “
This
is how you make tacos,” he said, assembling his concoction on a platter: tortillas stacked on top of tortillas, along with several pounds of tongue and great quantities of tomato and lemon zest. It was my first five-story taco. It bore no resemblance to any taco I’d seen before—in fact, towering so, with gobs of cream cheese spread along the side, it looked more like a wedding cake—but it remains the best taco I’ve eaten.
    You can’t really cook like this when you’re in a busy kitchen, but somehow everyone, at some point, made the time to prepare something intimate. It seemed to be at the heart of why you were a cook. Elisa once told me that in her ideal life, she would “cook only at home, with my friends at my table.” Gina put it more forcefully: “I invite you to my house, spend all day preparing your meal, watch your face as you eat it, bite by bite, and you tell me I’m wonderful? Whoa! That’s awesome!”
    One morning Gina came up with a new dessert. “Does that have too much almond in it?” she asked, feeding it to me by hand.
    I thought: she’s not interested in my opinion. “No, Gina, it’s perfect.”
    “Does this have too much almond?” she asked a guy delivering artichokes, putting a slice in his mouth, while he stood awkwardly, unable to use his hands, while Gina brushed a crumb off his lower lip.
    “Hmm…“ he said, talking through the food, “this is delicious.”
    “Does this have too much almond?” she asked Andy, seconds after he showed up just after noon. Andy waited for Gina to put the piece in his mouth, leaning forward, his lips puckered as though for a kiss.
    “Gina, you’re a genius.”
    And so it went, ten different people, each one fed by hand.
    I find myself thinking of Mrs. Waters’s seduction of Tom Jones, in the Henry Fielding novel. Actually, I see the movie version with