YET THEY CAN'T MAKE A DECENT PIZZA (profanity alert)A:

By then Buford had published his well-received Among the Thugs, a horrifying and very funny study of English football violence in the 1980s. (A nod to Buford's literary cred: early in Thugs he writes about attending his first English football match with two unnamed friends; he says they were Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa.) [...]

Dirt is big, 400-something pages, and the longest thing Buford has written. It started out as a pretty simple idea: go to Paris, work in a kitchen for a few months, bang out a book. This idea was jangling around in Buford's head well before Obama was elected, right after he wrapped up Heat. Basically, do Heat in France.

One problem: the French really didn't care about Buford or his book. If he wanted to go, which at that point meant taking his family (he and his wife, Jessica Green, a magazine editor turned wine expert, had preschool-age twin boys at the time), there would be beaucoup paperwork to fill out for their residency permits. So they did, and with a little fraudulent help from a well-placed friend, the Lyonnaise chef Daniel Boulud, they were in. Which was another problem: then they were there. And in Lyon, not Paris.

What follows is a mix of memoir, culinary anthropology, and immersion journalism, all told in Buford's hallmark erudite and ruthlessly self-effacing way. Early life in Lyon was a parade of difficulties and humiliations: contending with the French fetish for bureaucracy; finding an apartment; failing to find a kitchen to work in; finally getting work, only to be bullied by a 19-year-old kitchen psychopath; coming to realize that strangers thought Buford was a local in a city where, he writes, the men are all "ugly f[****]rs."

"It was a wild thing we did. Really, a wild thing," Buford says. "Because we get there, and everything's going wrong and I can't get into a kitchen, and I think, 'Well, what the f[***]? Now what?' Then I got into a kitchen where any reasonable person would say, 'Why didn't you get out of there?' But of course, as a writer, that's what you want."

The job Buford landed at the Michelin-starred restaurant La Mère Brazier required 15-plus-hour days in a kitchen where the culture resembled that of a pirate ship. The labor was so demanding and physical that he wound up losing weight working in a place where the recipes measured butter in kilos.

"I liked it a lot," Buford says. "I think I enjoy physical activity, but I've got kind of a desk brain. So, the pleasure of the situation--La Mère Brazier was different because it was so intense--is you can have a reflecting brain while you're doing a physical activity. It helps that I know that I'm going to be writing about it."

There are intellectual pursuits in the book as well as the demented rigors of the kitchen. Not to give anything away, but a turning point Buford discovers in the controversial history of interplay among Italian and French food (if you want to piss off the French, tell them French cuisine is actually Italian in origin, as Buford did repeatedly) will have people who care about such things looking at their ragù differently.

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