So what's it like to follow in Mario Batali's footsteps?

Bill Buford enslaved himself to superstar chef Mario Batali and got burned, bruised, and cut in the process, but he lived to tell the tale of that and much more. The long subtitle of his new book ``Heat" says it all: ``An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany."

While following his bliss to Batali's (reluctant) mentors in Italy, Buford learned as much about himself and about food's connection to culture and history as he did about ``Molto Mario." Buford, former fiction editor of The New Yorker and author of the best-selling ``Among the Thugs," spoke to the Globe by telephone from his home in New York City, where he lives with his wife and twin sons.

Q. Why Mario?

A. Partly because Mario himself is so charismatic and is able to convey the charisma of food. There's something very exciting about how he understands, as many chefs don't, how food is passed on from one generation to the next and how it's made by the hands and learned by the hands and how it all hearkens back to a woman in a tiny kitchen off a dirt road who learned it from her grandmother who learned it from her grandmother and on and on back to before we had any written history.

Q. What does Mario think about the way the book turned out?

A. He read it very quickly. He was very sweet, very flattering about the writing, and then he said, ``I'm suitably weirded out, and I can't believe the access we gave you." When he read the piece in The New Yorker, he was silent for a week and then said, ``It's like standing in front of a mirror naked for 24 hours."

Q. Why did you find it important to retrace his experiences in Italy?

A. I could've gone anywhere and spent time with anybody, but it gave me a course to follow. If you really want to learn the culture that goes into the food -- it could've been French, it could've been Polish, it could've been Romanian -- if it's a traditional handmade food, you've got to go to the place where they do it. And the truth is, the other people I approached to teach me said no.

Q. Some of them are a bit resentful about Mario's success, aren't they?

A. They do not understand how that man who never went to bed and drank way way way too much and seemed in their eyes to be unable to cook -- because there's only one way to cook, and it's their way -- has gone and made all this money in America. They don't get it.

Q. Mario tells you that the best cooks are women. Do you agree with that?

A. It is something you see in Italy. With the exception of this butcher I worked with, most of the restaurant kitchens are run by women, and the men run the front of the house. Mario and Joe [Bastianich] genuinely believe that women make better cooks. But to be honest, I haven't been able to make that leap of gender faith. I'm a guy, and I'm having a lot of fun cooking.

Q. Before the book, you started off as -- how did you put it? -- an eagerly mediocre home cook.

A. I was an enthusiastic and dysfunctional and self-destructively ambitious home cook.

Q. How good have you gotten?

A. I've learned a handful of skills that I didn't have before, like how to make handmade eggy pasta and not make it with a machine. But there's a whole attitude about cooking I've also learned, which is to be simple. The trick is to get a good ingredient or two good ingredients and then learn how to prepare it well. Rather than starting with an idea or a recipe, I'll start with something I want to eat or something I saw in the market. It's a very seasonal attitude, knowing what you want to eat at the beginning of June rather than what you want to eat in January.

Q. What do you want to eat at the beginning of June?

A. English peas and pork. I think right now I'd like to be making some homemade tagliatelle with green peas, guanciale [cured pork], and a little bit of butter. And some mint.

Q. What time is dinner?

A. (He laughs.) I'm making myself hungry, too.

Q. Do you want more food training?

A. As long as I'm stupid and curious, I'll keep doing this. At the moment I realized I'm absolutely clueless about dessert. So I'm hanging around dessert guys. It's for The New Yorker. I want a basic comfort with the foods of the world, which I guess is a way of connecting to the earth. And I'm recognizing things I don't do. Pastry is so precise and so scientific. I know nothing about it.

Q. Is that the next book?

A. The next is a book about California and a memoir of my father. And as you'll discover by the time you reach the end of ``Heat," I've made a commitment to go to France and do the same with French cooking.

Q. Will you build it around a big-name French chef, too?

A. We'll do something. I'll have to learn French, for one thing. It's humiliations, part two.

Bill Buford will read, answer questions, and sign copies of "Heat" on Monday at 7 p.m. in Longfellow Hall, Askwith Lecture Hall, 13 Appian Way, Harvard Square. Free. For information call 617-661-1515 or visit www.harvard.com.

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.