Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef [Hardcover]

Gabrielle Hamilton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2011

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors. The smells of spit-roasted lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became as necessary to her as her own skin.

Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; the soulless catering factories that helped pay the rent; Hamilton’s own kitchen at Prune, with its many unexpected challenges; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton’s idyllic past and her own future family—the result of a difficult and prickly marriage that nonetheless yields rich and lasting dividends.

Blood, Bones & Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion. By turns epic and intimate, it marks the debut of a tremendous literary talent.

“I wanted the lettuce and eggs at room temperature . . . the butter-and-sugar sandwiches we ate after school for snack . . . the marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. . . . There would be no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.”

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is just what a chef's story should be--delectable, dripping with flavor, tinged with adrenaline and years of too-little sleep. What sets Hamilton apart, though, is her ability to write with as much grace as vitriol, a distinct tenderness marbling her meaty story. Hamilton spent her idyllic childhood on a wild farm in rural Pennsylvania with an exhilarant father--an artist and set builder--and French mother, both "incredibly special and outrageously handsome." As she entered her teens, however, her family unexpectedly dissolved. She moved to New York City at 16, living off loose change and eating ketchup packets from McDonald’s; worked 20-hour days at a soulless catering company; traveled, often half-starved, through Europe; and cooked for allergy-riddled children at a summer camp. The constant thread running through this patchwork tale, which culminates with the opening of her New York City restaurant, Prune, is Hamilton's slow simmering passion for cooking and the comfort it can bring. "To be picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became the single most important food experience I came back to over and over," Hamilton writes, and it's this poignant understanding of the link between food and kindness that makes Blood, Bones & Butter so satisfying to read. --Lynette Mong

Guest Reviewer: Anthony Bourdain on Blood, Bones, and Butter

Anthony Bourdain is the author of the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, in addition to the bestseller Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. His work has appeared in the New York Times and The New Yorker, and he is a contributing authority for Food Arts magazine. He is also the host of the Emmy Award-winning television show No Reservations.

Very quickly after meeting Gabrielle Hamilton, I understood why she was a terrific and much-admired chef. I knew that her restaurant, Prune, was ground-breaking, that she seemed to have come out of nowhere, instead of being a product of the "system" (she'd emerged from the invisible subculture of catering), to open one of the most quirky, totally uncompromising, and quickly-embraced restaurants in New York City. Her purportedly (but not really) Franco-phobic menus were intensely, notoriously personal, her early embrace of the nose-to-tail attitude was way, way ahead the times, and chefs--all chefs--seemed to like and respect her. Almost as quickly, it became apparent that this chef could write.

Short pieces appeared here and there over the years and they were sharp, funny, incisive, unsparing of both author and subjects--straight to the point and pretense-free, like Hamilton herself. She could write really well. And she had, from all accounts, a story to tell. So when it was announced that Blood, Bones, and Butter was in the works, I was very excited.

It was a long wait.

Five years later, I finally got my hands on an advance copy and eagerly devoured it. It was of course brilliant. I expected it to be. But I wasn't prepared for exactly how goddamn brilliant the thing was, or how enchanted, difficult, strange, rich, inspiring and just plain hard her life and career--her long road to Prune--had been. I was unprepared for page after page of such sharp, carefully-crafted, ballistically-precise sentences. I was, frankly, devastated. I put this amazing memoir down and wanted to crawl under the bed, retroactively withdraw every book, every page I'd ever written. And burn them.

Blood, Bones, and Butter is, quite simply, the far-and-away best chef or food-genre memoir...ever. EVER. It certainly kicked the hell out of my Kitchen Confidential, which suddenly, in a second, felt shallow, sophomoric and ultimately lightweight next to this...this monster of a book, this--at times--truly hardscrabble life…Blood, Bones, and Butter is deeper, better written, more hardcore, more fully fleshed-out; a more well-rounded story than every sunflower-and-saffron account of soft-core food porn in France. It's as bullshit and pretense-free as AJ Leibling--and at least as well written, but more poignant, romantic--even thrilling.

It makes any "as told to" account of famous chef's lives look instantly ludicrous and bloodless. I've struggled to think of somebody/anybody who's written a better account of the journey to chefdom and can't think of anyone who's come even close.

Writing a memoir of one's life as a chef--or even writing about one's relationship with food--has, with the publication of this book, become much more difficult. Hamilton has raised the bar higher than most of us could ever hope to reach. This book will sell a gazillion copies. It will be a bestseller. It will be an enduring classic. It will inspire generation after generation of young cooks, and anyone who really loves food and understands the context in which it is best enjoyed, NOT as some isolated, over-valued object of desire, but as only one important aspect of a larger, richer spectrum of experiences. Each plate of food--like the menu at Prune--is the end result of a long and sometimes very difficult struggle.

Read this book and prepare to clean your system of all that's come before. It's a game-changer and a truly great work by a great writer and great chef.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Owner and chef of New York's Prune restaurant, Hamilton also happens to be a trained writer (M.F.A., University of Michigan) and fashions an addictive memoir of her unorthodox trajectory to becoming a chef. The youngest of five siblings born to a French mother who cooked "tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones" in a good skirt, high heels, and apron, and an artist father who made the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, Hamilton spent her early years in a vast old house on the rural Pennsylvania–New Jersey border. With the divorce of her parents when she was an adolescent, the author was largely left to her own devices, working at odd jobs in restaurants. Peeling potatoes and scraping plates-"And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start." At age 16, in 1981, she got a job waiting tables at New York's Lone Star Cafe, and when caught stealing another waitress's check, she was nearly charged with grand larceny. After years of working as a "grunt" freelance caterer and going back to school to learn to write (inspired by a National Book Foundation conference she was catering), Hamilton unexpectedly started up her no-nonsense, comfort-food Prune in a charming space in the East Village in 1999. Hamilton can be refreshingly thorny (especially when it comes to her reluctance to embrace the "foodie" world), yet she is also as frank and unpretentious as her menu-and speaks openly about marrying an Italian man (despite being a lesbian), mostly to cook with his priceless Old World mother in Italy. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Printing edition (March 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140006872X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400068722
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (200 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Gastronomy
  • #59 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics
  • #86 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Specific Groups > Women

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

366 of 392 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Blood and bones but not much butter, February 7, 2011

By 

M. Feldman (Maine, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

A memoir written by a chef is appealing because it promises to take us to a place few of us ever see, unless it's on the Food Network---that is, a restaurant kitchen. It promises to reveal all of the gritty, unlovely steps leading up to the moment when the beautiful plate emerges from the pass and into the hands of the waitstaff. In addition, after Anthony Bourdain led the way, such a memoir must also offer appetite-killers: dirty walk-ins, unsavory butchering scenes. And, like a religious testament, it also has those conversion moments, the moment when the chef discovers that she or he is destined to become an artist with food. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir has all of these elements.

When Hamilton writes about food, she's entertaining, irreverent, and even spiritual. Her engaging account of her father's spring lamb roast (an edited version of this piece recently appeared in The New Yorker) establishes the origins of her love of food. Her account of her years working for catering companies will make you think hard before you pick up that next wedding hors d'oeuvre from the waiter's silver plate. And a chapter about cooking at a summer camp in the Berkshires is funny and deft in its handling of detail. I loved her wry depiction of the time she spent in a master's writing program, from the satirical descriptions of her fellow writers to her homage to Misty, a fellow cook and, for Hamilton, a kind of culinary muse.

This book aspires to be more than just a chef memoir, however, since the subtitle refers to "The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef." In particular, this is a book about family: about Hamilton's own family, painfully riven by divorce when she was still a child, and about her marriage and the birth of her two sons. With the exception of the opening chapters, these parts of the book are often difficult to read, mostly because they have almost none of the good qualities (sharp detail, humor, self-awareness) of the "chef" sections. Her relationship with her mother, the "spider" of a chapter about a long, miserable visit to Vermont, is so angry and painful that you want to avert your eyes. After such a rant, a reader comes not a whit closer to understanding this mother or why she behaves as she does. As for Hamilton's marriage to Michele, the man whose ancestral home in Italy is the setting for the last ("Butter') section of the book, this too is the subject of pages and pages of rage and disappointment. Yes, this unhappiness is somewhat mitigated by Hamilton's initial happiness in cooking and eating in Italy, as well as her pleasure in being part of Michele's extended family. In the end, however, the many pages devoted to descriptions of glorious Italian foodstuffs (think Frances Mayes, with cursing) turn into too much eggplant, the Italian family disappoints, and the marriage remains a source of sorrow.

There are many memoirs about unhappy families. How the writer shapes that material is key. The difference between "Blood, Bones, and Butter" and other memoirs about bad parents, like Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life" or Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club," is one of perspective. Even when Wolff is telling us about how his mother failed to protect him from his abusive stepfather or Karr is describing yet another chilling incident with her parents, we know the grown-up writers understand why their parents acted the way they did. This sort of perspective is not evident in Hamilton's memoir, perhaps because she has not yet gained it. In her book, the education of Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef, is presented as the most interesting of dishes, full of diverse and sometimes surprising ingredients---and so it is. (I was lucky to have the chance to eat, just once, in her restaurant, Prune, and she is truly a wonder in the kitchen.) However, her depiction here of her education as daughter, wife, and mother awaits a more finished account.

M. Feldman

106 of 118 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary + Culinary Creativity, February 28, 2011

By 

litaddiction (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

"Slowly the meadow filled with people and fireflies and laughter -- just as my father had imagined -- and the lambs on their spits were hoisted off the pit onto the shoulders of men, like in a funeral procession, and set down on the makeshift plywood-on-sawhorse tables to be carved. Then the sun started to set and we lit the paper bag luminaria, which burned soft glowing amber, punctuating the meadow and the night, and the lamb was crisp-skinned and sticky from slow roasting, and the root beer was frigid and caught, like an emotion, in the back of my throat."

Gabrielle Hamilton looks back on her nine-year-old self in that passage -- over-the-moon infatuated with her older siblings, her mother's way in the kitchen and her father's way with setting a stage ... and unaware that divorce and neglect are just around the corner.

By 13, she's drugging with an older crowd and lying about her age to get work in restaurant kitchens to support herself; before long she's participating in a felony-level employee theft racket. Yet she has a knack for stumbling onto cooking mentors and gradually learns enough to run the kitchen at a kids' summer camp and freelance-cook at high-volume caterers for fancy Hamptons (NY) parties. She completes a fiction-writing MFA, but only because she simultaneously finds a wellspring of sanity and true creativity in a side cooking job that recalls the down-to-earth food and settings of her childhood. And it's with that "real food" perspective that she eventually opens a restaurant -- New York City's acclaimed Prune.

There's evidence of that MFA in this memoir -- a beautiful mix of literary and culinary creativity. I marked evocative passages throughout, and especially recall Hamilton's homage to the simplicity and humility of 75-year-old (chef extraordinaire) Andre Soltner preparing a perfect omelet. Although she does settle into a somewhat straightforward prose to tell the bulk of her story, and I don't think she's quite figured out her relationships with her parents or partners, these pages are fierce and vivid. And thus I also find myself over-the-moon infatuated -- with Hamilton's writing and with her story of reclaiming family ... or at least an adult, work-centered facsimile of it.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Promising early on, but second half degrades with every page, April 23, 2011

By 

Mike Duncan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Hardcover)

Anthony Bourdain's memoir, `Kitchen Confidential,' was a revelation for me. I had never been exposed to the hidden world of restaurant kitchens. His personality can be grating and his style is exaggerated, but he had a story to tell, and told it well. After reading his book, I wanted more of this insane cooking underworld.

I thought of his book when I purchased `Blood, Bones & Butter,' (BB&B) a memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef and owner of Prune restaurant in New York. In fact, his quote is on the cover of the book, "Magnificent. Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever." (Italics on the cover) Is he saying this with a sense of sarcasm since his memoir was so popular? I hope so. While there are flashes of inspiring prose and some compelling stories, the complete package is uneven and disappointing, like a collapsed chocolate soufflé.

As the title suggests, the book is broken into three sections. The first is called `Blood', and presumably refers to the author's family. Initially, I was seduced by Hamilton's very `writerly' style. Early on, I flipped to the back cover and sure enough, she has an MFA from the University of Michigan. She has legitimate writing chops. Her style is a mix between elegance and grittiness, which is somewhat of an odd combination, and yet works well at the beginning. In the first few chapters, I had difficulty adjusting to her style, which is somewhat dense, yet I was intrigued enough to keep going, and eventually found a rhythm.

In the first chapter, Hamilton paints an idyllic view of her French aristocratic mother, dreamer artist father and her siblings. She describes an annual party that the family threw, around her ninth birthday I believe, which seems to be the last happy memory she has of her family together. She masterfully includes poignant details, like keeping drinks chilled in a nearby stream, word play with her father's nickname, and vivid descriptions of food.

The fun ends with the first chapter, as her parents seemingly abandon her and a brother, to literally fend for themselves, in a big house in what seems like a somewhat rural area of New Jersey, but not far from a small town. Forced to earn a living at thirteen, she lies about her age and begins working at a local diner, as a dish washer, and then eventually works as a waitress in New York. These early chapters work because Hamilton has interesting stories to tell about her rough and tumble early entrance into adulthood. The last chapter in the section describes the author's gruesome killing of a chicken after a retreat from New York, while staying at her father's house. And she ends this section with a funny and memorable way, which shows her ability to turn a phrase:

"There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive and learn how to kill a chicken. I'm not sure you should sit across from each other and eat the roasted bird in resentful silence either, but we did that too, and the meat, as if scripted, was disagreeably tough."

The section called `Bones' is the longest (about half the book) and I'm guessing that the title refers to her fully growing into adulthood, but there could be multiple interpretations. This section starts well, with some interesting stories, like her amusing work as a chef for a kid's camp (poor lobsters!) and the opening of Prune. I found her non-traditional training as a chef, during her romp across Europe (particularly the little restaurant in Serifos), enduring and particularly insightful for understanding her cooking.

While the story of Prune is compelling, the author's voice changes throughout the chapter, and sometimes she seems to be channeling Anthony Bourdain. The rants about cooking seemed forced and fake, and they seem to come out of nowhere. Like the following passage,

"Sunday is an order fire day. Every ticket comes in and is shouted out and is picked up immediately. We do not wait patiently while the customer enjoys a section of the New York Times over a nice bowl of homemade granola before firing up his sour cream and caraway omelette. We do not. We are sometimes laying down omelette pans on the flames by the half-dozen, and delivering that many omelets in as many minutes."
She's a professional chef with 20 years of experience. Is it really that hard to cook a bunch of eggs? Everybody thinks that they have a stressful job, but not everybody does. I don't know what it's like to be a chef, but her tough attitude seems inauthentic and wildly exaggerated.

When she meets her husband, on page 159, the book starts to fall apart. A couple things happen at this point. The stories start to become more infrequent and it's replaced largely with the author's ruminations. Her restaurant is already open and seemingly successful, so these stories start to trail off. The narrative arc where Hamilton overcomes long odds to become a successful restaurateur is over and the new one is her failing marriage, which is somewhat of a bait and switch.

Did she just run out of material? The last half of the book seems like a therapy session and her internal dialogue grates after awhile. She describes a visit to her mother's house, after not seeing her for 20 years. Nothing happens, except the author's vivid depictions of her mother as a spider queen and other terrible incarnations. Some scenes made me cringe, especially the resistance to showing her mother any physical affection seconds after nursing her own child. Give your mom a chance. If she doesn't deserve one, explain why ... otherwise I can't empathize!

The final section, `Butter', ostensibly describes her love of the simple life in Italy, but seems to focus more on her sham marriage. This un-love story is the most painful part of the book. She marries her Italian husband on what seems like a whim, despite the fact that she is in a relationship with a woman and he is legitimately in love with her. Huh? Okay, fine, I'll go with that, but then she proceeds to tear him apart with some vicious comments that took my breath away, like,

"In all the years we have spent together ... he has never, incredibly, incomprehensibly, said anything important to me."

Then, why did you marry him? Why did you have kids with him? She continued to take shots that seem unfair and snarky, and I couldn't really sympathize with this mess of a marriage that she got herself into. And what sends her over the edge, the dagger in the heart of this relationship? Her husband says he wants to buy a new iPhone.

The author's relationship with her husband is a balloon with a hole, which slowly deflates with each passing chapter. Yes, she also develops a special bond with her husband's mother and the people of Italy and their food, yet I was more distracted by the marriage spectacle. I had trouble concentrating on the negroni's and the warm barratta cheese, while she ripped her husband to shreds.

BB&B has some compelling stories that are beautifully told, but the narrative lacks cohesion. While she starts the book `in scene', she seems to devolve into her own head, which is maddening and one of the first lessons that I ever learned about writing effectively (rumination is not interesting). My wild, unsubstantiated guess would be that the first portion of the book was written while the author was getting her MFA (heavily work-shopped) and was the basis for the book contract. Then, she had to write the rest of the book, while running a restaurant, taking care of two kids and dealing with a failing marriage. I'm not sure if that's what happened, but I wouldn't be surprised given how the book degrades with each passing chapter. Too bad, because the first few chapters were really promising.