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Friends whose dining-out experiences don’t extend much beyond the American equivalent of a Berni Inn have told me that Lagasse is ‘the greatest chef in the world’. In the US, the cable TV Food Network reaches 85 million households, guaranteeing financial success for its stars’ books, videos and restaurants and making some of them so famous that they’re stopped on the street for autographs and have their names chanted out by Bud Lite-drinking hard-hats when they’re spotted on the sidelines at American football games.

And then – as if we need to know still more – there are the biographies: first, of past celebrity chefs (Escoffier and Carême), then of recent martyrs to perfectionism (Bernard Loiseau: two biographies), and now of domestic cooks or commercial chefs who’ve been on television or written a bestseller: Jamie (two), Gordon, Nigella, the clownish American TV chef Emeril Lagasse, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Irma Rombauer (compiler of the American suburban kitchen bible, The Joy of Cooking), and even Delia. Not just how to cook a mushroom risotto like Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain, but what it’s like to be Jamie or Nigella or Gordon or Tony: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, How to be a Domestic Goddess, In the Heat of the Kitchen, Kitchen Confidential. Many of the books sell themselves not so much as sources of practical information – how to make a wild mushroom risotto – but as windows onto both the skills and the emotional life of a celebrity cook. It is a book to delight in, and to savour.What’s all this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections it’s no longer clear where one ends and the other begins.

Heat is a marvellous hybrid: a memoir of Buford's kitchen adventures, the story of Batali's amazing rise to culinary fame, a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at a famous restaurant, and an illuminating exploration of why food matters.

He worked his way up to 'line cook' and then left New York to learn from the very teachers who had taught his teacher: preparing game with Marco Pierre White, making pasta in a hillside trattoria, finally becoming apprentice to a Dante-spouting butcher in Chianti. Buford accepted the commission, on the condition Batali allow him to work in his kitchen, as his slave. Bill Buford, an enthusiastic, if rather chaotic, home cook, was asked by the New Yorker to write a profile of Mario Batali, a Falstaffian figure of voracious appetites who runs one of New York's most successful three-star restaurants.