Bill Buford

Bill Buford is an American journalist and author who spent twenty years as fiction editor of The New Yorker before leaving to apprentice in professional kitchens and document what he found.

Bill Buford was fiction editor of The New Yorker for twenty years — the editor who published many of the American short stories of the 1990s and 2000s — before he became obsessed with cooking and left his job to apprentice in Mario Batali’s kitchen at Babbo. Heat (2006) is his account of what followed: months as the lowest-ranking person in a professional kitchen, then a journey to Italy to find the origins of what he was cooking.

The Italian sections of Heat — the time with a fifth-generation Tuscan butcher, the lessons from a pasta grandmother in Emilia-Romagna — are among the finest food writing in English: deeply observed, rigorously attentive to technique, and genuinely curious about the difference between knowing a recipe and carrying embodied knowledge in your hands.

His second food book, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking (2020), repeated the experiment in France: moving his family to Lyon, apprenticing in French kitchens, and tracing the origins of classical French cuisine. It received universal praise and confirmed that Buford had found, in his sixties, the subject he was born to write about.