White Heat (book)

White Heat

First edition cover
Author	Marco Pierre White
Illustrator	Bob Carlos Clarke
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Cookbook
Publisher	Mitchell Beazley
Publication date	1990
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Pages	126 pp (first edition)
ISBN
OCLC	44540505
Followed by	Wild Food From Land and Sea (1994)

White Heat is a cookbook by chef Marco Pierre White, published in 1990. It features black and white photographs by Bob Carlos Clarke. It is partially autobiographical, and is considered to be the chef's first memoir. The book is cited today as having influenced the careers of several Michelin starred and celebrity chefs, and was described by one critic as "possibly the most influential recipe book of the last 20 years".

Initially published in 1990, White Heat was part autobiography of chef Marco Pierre White and part cookbook, that portrays White's "bad boy" chef image. White was introduced by actress Lowri-Ann Richards to her friend Bob Carlos Clarke. Clarke photographed White for a Levi jeans advert and went on to create the images for White Heat. Speaking following Clarke's death in 2006, Marco Pierre White said, "He was like my prop. Without Bob there would never have been White Heat."

White Heat is credited with changing the image of chefs to sex symbols. The photographs showed White in and out of the workplace, including smoking in the kitchen and working with his team, including a young Gordon Ramsay. One of the photographs featured White with a dead baby shark, which was laid across his lap in Clarke's garden for the shot. Clarke's wife Lindsay later said in an interview that Marco went on to gut the shark there and then in the garden, "The stench was unbelievable. I was pregnant at the time and the odour haunted me." Another photograph featured White nude with a side of piglet in his lap. One of Clarke's images of White was included in a set of ten donated to the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2013.

John Lanchester, for The Observer magazine supplement Life in 2003, described the book as "gastroporn". Sue Gaisford, reviewing the book for The Independent, described it as a "Marco Pierre White fanzine-with-recipes" and an "ego-trip". In 2005 food critic Jay Rayner called White Heat "possibly the most influential recipe book of the last 20 years".