I didn't think I was going to pick Lyon, but the more time I spent with French cooks, the more I learned of their respect for the city of Lyon and that Lyon represented the closest to pure French cooking.Īs one chef said, Paris could be New York. Why did you pick Lyon? People would obviously assume that you might go to Paris or some other destination in France. I remember that conversation as being one of the most majestic conversations of our married life. (Submitted by Bill Buford)Īnd it was transformative. We're moving to Lyon as a family," and not only that - and this is probably the most terrifying thing - we're gonna do it legitimately going through the French consulate with real visas.īuford travelled to Lyon with his wife, Jessica, and their twins. When I proposed that maybe I needed to go to France by myself, she immediately and resolutely said, "No, we're going as a family. She's a renowned French chef and I was there much longer than my wife liked my being away. How did you convince her that this was a good idea for the whole family to go what was something that was initially going to be a few months, and then turns into this epic adventure?Īt the time, I was doing a preparation apprenticeship with Michelle Rishard in Washington, D.C. There are a series of, as you say, important conversations that happened. And I wanted that knowledge.Īnd the other was a covert, almost anarchic suspicion that the Italian belief that they actually invented French cooking might be historically true. One is that although I did become, I think, a reasonably accomplished Italian cook from my time in Italy, there's always a belief that the real cooks, the trained cooks - the cooks that everyone respects - is a French cook.
Why did you want to go to France? Heat was about Italy and immersing yourself in Italian food and culture.
Here's part of his conversation with The Current'sMatt Galloway. It's not the first time the New Yorker packed up his life to take up cooking in a new country. His 2006 memoir Heat chronicles his experiences learning the history and secrets to Italy's cuisine, from pasta making to pig slaughtering.īut with high expectations - and a vastly different culture - it was obvious he would have to work his way up to become a French cook in Lyon. I was a New Yorker journalist, and they just didn't want to have anything to do with me," said Buford, author of the new memoir Dirt.
When writer and "reasonably accomplished Italian cook" Bill Buford first landed in Lyon, France, hoping to start his journey as a French cook, he wasn't taken seriously.
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