In the good old days, when a man went through his midlife crisis, he bought a big noisy motorcycle or found a 24-year-old yoga instructor who really understood him. Nowadays, it seems, he learns to cook. And then he writes a book about it.

Bob Spitz's "The Saucier's Apprentice" is just the latest example of this trend. Bill Buford's wonderful "Heat," which recently was published in paperback, became a national best-seller last year, telling his tale of dropping a high-falutin' job as fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine to become a galley slave at Mario Batali's Babbo and then following his ever-increasing passion to Italy.

Spitz's conversion wasn't as extreme as Buford's and perhaps for that reason neither is the resulting book as accomplished. But it is a lot of fun and told in mostly high spirits. Think of it as a really good culinary beach book — a combination of confessional, cookbook and travelogue.

I raced through it in a day and found it very enjoyable, which is quite a credit to Spitz the writer considering how irritating I found Spitz the main character.

It's a curious book, starting with the title. A funny pun, for sure, but not at all original. In fact, it's borrowed from a very good, quite well known book by Raymond Sokolov. Granted, that version of "Saucier's Apprentice" was published in the 1970s, but it is still in print. Choosing to take somebody else's title, and one so widely known, is a strange beginning.

Although ostensibly similar — two middle-aged, successful, male writers discover cooking — the differences between "Saucier" and "Heat" are interesting. In the first place, while Buford never really deals with his motivations for the quest (it appears like some kind of fever that strikes without warning), Spitz explores his reasons in quite a lot of depth, which, it turns out, is a mixed blessing.

"The Saucier's Apprentice" begins with the author deep in the dumps. He has just turned 50. His long-awaited project, a book on the Beatles, has just been published (and, although he doesn't make much of it, to very good reviews). His marriage has just ended.

In short, he's betwixt and between and the only thing that gives him pleasure, he decides, is cooking lavish dinner parties for his friends.

ENNUI — C'EST LA VIE

But he desperately wants to do it better. At the end of a long day of cooking, he confesses, he can't help but feel that the oohs and ahs of his guests just aren't of the magnitude they should be.

And so he decides that a summer taking cooking classes in Europe would be just the ticket out of his ennui.

You just know that things are apt to go awry.

While Buford animated "Heat" with a passionate quest for craft, Spitz seems more of a dabbler in search of recipes: He seems to have picked up the phone and made reservations at some of those fancy vacation cooking schools that pop up anywhere there are people looking to spend serious money eating in beautiful places. With only a couple of exceptions, his journey seems to have been limited to Provence, Tuscany and Paris.

As a student, Spitz is of a type familiar to most anyone who has ever taught a cooking class. A combination of needy and disdainful, he's the guy who sits in the front of the class waving his hand with question after question but ends up disappointed because the rest of the students just aren't as serious as he is.

Spitz isn't shy about letting them know that, either, which leads to some merry high jinks for the reader who might wind up wondering who is more irritating — the main character, or those who irritate him. The answer in most cases is "both."

Still, your sympathies may well be with the Frenchman who meets him at the door with a cleaver and the comment, "The daycare center is somewhere on the other side of town."