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Bill Buford Quotes

You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.

You can't do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.

Bill Buford
Needs, Pace, Calm

In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'

Bill Buford
Mean, Simplicity, Use
Bill Buford (2013). “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany”, p.100, Random House

The most important knowledge is understanding what you can't do.

Bill Buford
Understanding, Important
Bill Buford (2013). “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany”, p.293, Random House

Food made by hand is an act of defiance and runs contrary to everything in our modernity. Find it; eat it; it will go. It has been around for millennia. Now it is evanescent, like a season.

Bill Buford
Running, Hands, Made

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

Bill Buford
Family, Essentials, Ifs

Then he exploded. "No!" he said. That familiar injunction. I'd heard it so many times. "No. I cannot take this steel. It would not be correct." He opened his knife drawer. "It goes here," he said, "until you return."(That's how you leave: by never saying good-bye.)And I learned that: to return. I came back the following year and the year after that. I hope to return every year (after all, I may never have the chance to learn so much), until I have no one to return to. (301)

Bill Buford
Years, Knives, Bye

A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.

Bill Buford
Food, June, July

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

Bill Buford
School, Cutting, Knives
Bill Buford (2013). “Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany”, p.67, Random House

The crowd is not us. It never is.

Bill Buford
Crowds
Bill Buford (2011). “Among The Thugs”, p.190, Random House

Literature is always best when it is celebrating its subjects darkly. ... And because it is often by describing the thing lost - a family, a moment of happiness, a child, a father - that we understand the full weight of what we had.

Bill Buford
Children, Father, Literature

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