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When I thought pot was cool I learned about a peculiar feeling. It came when I wrote something stoned, and read it again later. What had been able to hold my squirrelly, chittering attention became an embarrassing waste of time while sober. This book brought back that precise feeling. I can't say why, exactly, but I think it had to do with how MA's attention jumps around with the air of casual intelligence without making valuable insights, analyzing the technical side of debt, or going into interesting history. For example, Jewish people used to celebrate the jubilee 7-year cycle after which debts were forgiven. That factoid is about as deep as I remember this book going, when details about how people organized their businesses/lives/etc around such a temporary form of debt would have been new to me and interesting.

I loved this book a whole lot - and warn that should you tackle it, please do so with a large amount of red wine and italian food readily available. Much like it's torture to watch Chocolat without chocolate, it would be rude not to eat pasta and drink red wine while this book's in your life. The book's an amalgamation of many things I love - cooking, peeking behind the scenes at famous restaurants, drinking wine, contemplating where food does and should come from. Buford spent just over a year slowly learning skills in Mario Batali's kitchen, and his memoir of those months is interspersed by historical wanderings - when did eggs come to replace water in preparing pasta dough? Who wrote the first definitive Italian cookbook? Did Catherine de Medici really create French cuisine when she moved to France, betrothed to a Prince? There's even a little philosophizing on offer, a la Pollan and Bittman - it's not fast food or slow food that's the issue, Buford argues, it's big food and little food that matters: Italians have a word, casalinga, homemade, although its primary sense is "made by hand." My theory is just a variant of casalinga. (Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant.) I loved the behind-the-scenes details of what goes on in the kitchen of a good restaurant, and the historical diversions, and the quotes from centuries-old textbooks. Buford delivers all of it with a good sense of humor, especially when reflecting on his own mistakes, and the whole thing is fascinating and entertaining to a really remarkable degree. Yay book!