Customer Reviews

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

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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

"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.

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.

Had this book ended in the middle, it would have been a good, light read. Hamilton is a skilled creative writer and the first part of her book was interesting. In it, she admits to a troubled past that included grand larceny, auto theft and drug use. She did not express remorse or any desire to make restitution, but I took this as the starkly candid confession of someone who had grown up and wised up. From there, she takes us through Europe and on to the opening her restaurant; very engaging. After that, the callous, deceptive self-obsessed character that I thought we had left behind pages before resurfaces - not as a forgivable mixed up youth, but as a scary, middle-aged woman. No reflection. No apologies. Hamilton seems to have an unhealthy and unrelenting contempt for other people and a superiority complex that fans the flame. She doesn't cut slack for anyone else, and never finds fault with herself. (In other words, she strikes me as one of those "Can dish it out, but can't take it" people--the kind who are so in the habit of being mean that they are unaware of how awful they're being and how horrible they are to put up with.) It's depressing to think that we live in a culture that rewards a person for this level of arrested development and shallow self-obsession. I'm sorry, but masterfully well-turned phrases and clever metaphors can't carry pointless, harsh, indiscreet talk for an entire book. Authorship is authorship. Therapy is therapy. After 150 pages or so, it began to feel as if Ms. Hamilton had completely confused those two very different things. Where on earth was her editor?

Blood, Bones & Butter starts with a bang in a brilliant chapter on the author's parents' annual lamb roast; it's chock full of extraordinary episodes in Hamilton's most unusual life; and its well-written observations are frequently fascinating (thank God someone has finally characterized the deathless reading style of modern poets!). But for me it was ultimately disappointing.

If it's meant to be an autobiography of an interesting person, it leaves out the self-reflection and emotional life that would draw readers in and explain the author's character. If it's really about the education of a chef, it mostly misses the experience of the food - there are only brief mentions of the tastes, smells, or textures of eating and, except for a few pages when Hamilton decides to open her restaurant, no indications of what she's trying to create as a chef. If it's just a series of interesting vignettes (alla Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw), it lacks the humor and personality in the author's voice that keep a reader engaged.

Perhaps if I were more of a foodie - I've never heard of Hamilton or Prune and I found her assumption that the reader already knows all about her restaurant off-putting - I would have gobbled this book up with relish, but as it is, I was left hungry for more substance.

This book really frustrated me. In interviews, the author declares she wrote a book in the way she wishes others would write books. Please, dear literary gods, no! While a lot of her writing is wonderful, prose-wise, and she certainly has a lot to write about having led an interesting life, it jumped around more than the chicken whose head she happily lopped off as a teen. The parts about her childhood were terrific and then, ka-boom, she's a lesbian living in NY. She's in graduate school. She's living with a woman in NY, opens Prune. Marries a man. Doesn't talk to her mother for 20 years. She boasts about her honesty in interviews, but too many questions go unanswered. She's not honest about why she didn't talk to her mother, why she married a man she had no true feelings for. And the death of her brother is mentioned as casually as the specials on a menu. No mention of how he died or how it affected her--a person according to the blurb on the book jacket, hungry to recreate the family she left behind in PA. By the end of the book, I admired her passion for cooking, but found her totally annoying. Spoiled. Obnoxious. No wonder she and Anthony Bourdain are such good friends.

Most bios from foodies usually either give a detailed lowdown on food, or on the writer's life - the really good ones often do both. This book didn't give much of either. The author describes herself as a lesbian, but somehow not only marries a man, but one she neither knows well, nor has a particle of affection for. Her dislike for him is so intense that he appears undeserving of even the most basic description, save a long list of his shortcomings. When she quotes him (usually as a means of explaining why he is such a blithering idiot) he speaks in an accent that (on paper) bears a bizarre resemblance to Tattoo on Fantasy Island. She spends chapters talking about going to Italy, where she can cook with her husband's family but can't really talk to them. Not much to learn there, unless you want to hear about how she made little penis shaped noodles with a knitting needle, and ate endless plates of eggplant.

So that leads us to her basic message, repeated again and agin - 1) that she is super pissed off alot, and 2) that she is also real (real) busy. That's why she writes to-do lists, and includes them in her book (clean kitchen, have baby, butterfly rabbits, blah) to demonstrate she has a blackbelt in badass. This, I guess, qualifies her as a real tough lady - which I completely believe, though she didn't need to spend nearly that much time convincing me.

I actually really enjoy reading books about folks who have completely screwed up personal lives (check out Running With Scissors for an amazing example). When done well, it makes for fascinating reading. However, because the author is unwilling to add any significant detail to her personal narrative, it comes off as bleak, self indulgent, and utterly monotonous.

The real problem here is that the story simply isn't that remarkable. She grew up in a family where her parents divorced, and where she had to deal on her own at a young age. She worked lots of restaurant and catering jobs, finally managed to finish college, got an MFA, and started a small restaurant in NYC. Oh, and she is a lesbian who married a guy she loathes. That about sums it up. So in the absence of an amazing life, she needed to tell an amazing story. She was unwilling to do this, however, and settled instead for either moaning about her lousy husband, or congratulating herself on being one tough chick. Mazeltov.

At times I felt like what she most desperately needed was an editor to tell her to quit vetching. Go to work, cook, go home, be part of a family, stop being such a self obsessed spaz. The old adage "if you only knew how seldom most people actually thought about you, you would quickly realize how insignificant your foibles really are" seems especially apt here.

The biggest bummer, though, is that she really didn't talk much about food, which I feel sure she would be better at describing than her personal life. At the very least, she could have focused on something she was good at.

Gabrielle Hamilton is a chef with an MFA in creative writing, and it shows here. Her writing style is clear and compelling, and her life has certainly been interesting enough to be worth writing about. However, I had two issues with this book. First, as the title suggests, it's part of the new "gross is good" genre of chef memoirs. It's not as if the entire book is a succession of gross anecdotes, but there were enough of them to put me off. Second, and more important, there's no narrative arc. I don't expect a novelistic "ending" from a memoir, but somewhere around the time the book ends, I do expect to get some sense of what the author is trying to tell us about his or her life. There's none of that here. The book just sort of stops. Maybe that was a conscious decision on the author's part, but I found it frustrating.

"Blood, Bones and Butter" is a surprise because it's not the clichéd story of a girl who wants to be a cook when she grows up. On the contrary, it's the story of a wild child --- when her parents divorced, her mother moved to northern Vermont, briefly taking her 13-year-old daughter with her, then letting her return to the family home in New Jersey to live with her father. Translation: Gabrielle pretty much had to fend for herself.

Her days began with banks calling her father. (He worked in the theater. He had five kids. He insisted on sending them to private school --- on an artist's wages. Do the math.) They ended with her smoking cigarettes and "borrowing" cars.

Gabrielle graduated at 16 and headed to New York, where she lived in a dive and used stolen ketchup from McDonald's as spaghetti sauce. At 17, she was working the bar at the Lone Star Café and making $90,000 a year, most of which she spent on drugs. Busted by her employer for fraud, she wangled a slot at Hampshire College. She lasted five semesters. When she left, she was, she says, "a staunch Marxist feminist, budding lesbian, black nationalist sympathizer."

Happy? So not. She writes: "If there was any single inch of my own flesh or remote coil of my own brain that I have warm regard for at this time, I cannot recall it."

She had one skill: kitchen work. She could clean kitchens and stand over blistering stoves and not hate the long hours. She is revelatory about large catering companies. And she is hilarious about cooking at a summer camp where the counselors, who were once campers, can't stop hugging one another: "I had not seen such a thing since I myself was nineteen and working two simultaneous hits of Ecstasy."

Eventually, restlessness struck. Starting with $1,000, she headed to Europe, where she learned to starve, had adventures, and began to store the memories that would become the inspiration for Prune.

And then she went to Michigan and enrolled in its graduate writing program. Why?

"I wanted to do more than spend my days with my hands thrust into a bowl of micro-greens dressed with aged balsamic and garnished with toasted pumpkin seeds and roasted apricots. I had always wanted to contribute in some way. Leave a little more than I took."

It's easy to make fun of writing programs --- and she does. But there's more here. To keep herself sane, she takes a restaurant job. And there acquires her first mentor. Her education has, finally, begun.

When she decided to launch Prune --- it's her childhood nickname --- in 1999, her ideas were far from the ones you learn at the Culinary Institute. These were the elements she wants to see in her restaurant:

"....the old goat herder smoking filterless cigarettes coming down the mountain, crushing oregano and wild mint underfoot; Iannis cooking me two fried eggs without even asking me if I cared for something to eat; that sweet, creamy milk that the milk wallah in Delhi frothed by pouring in a long sweeping arc between two pots held as far apart as the full span of his arms from his cart decorated with a thousand fresh marigolds...."

And more...

"... a Velvet Underground CD...butter and sugar sandwiches from my childhood...the canned sardines I ate in that little apartment on 23rd Street...brown butcher paper for tablecloths....jelly jars for wine glasses...."

This is wonderful stuff, much better than the blather about vertical entrees and locally farmed vegetables in foodie books. It's exalted --- Gabrielle's ferociously ambitious for her restaurant as a quality destination. And it's cheerfully absurd. One minute she's cleaning the basement stairs after maggots burst out of a dead rat, the next she's off in a Town Car to tape a segment with Martha Stewart.

Her personal life has an equally unexpected rhythm. Although she claims to be content with her "gold golden girlfriend of goldness," she meets Michele, an Italian doctor/researcher who cooks for her. His bread "tasted of nothing but the effort," but his ravioli.... They marry, he gets his green card, children follow.

It's a strange marriage --- they don't live together, they don't talk much, their only deep bonding occurs during their annual summer trip to his mother's house in Italy --- and if the book ended before those July trips began, I would declare this a flawless memoir.

For one thing, I believe almost all books --- even books as well written as this --- would benefit from the loss of 50-75 pages. For another, brevity is even more essential in a book with food at or near its center. There's only so much delicious prose you can stand, only so much you can read about meals and food combinations. Butter and oil and fatty prosciutto on bread --- yes, I swooned. The first time. But there comes a point when even a glutton is sated.

This is a minor criticism, equivalent to carping about the cookies after a fantastic meal. What matters so much more is the human story --- the adventures of a fearless girl, a young woman's refusal to be anyone other than herself, an adult's hard-won triumph. And, above all, her all-seeing eye, her smart mouth, her light touch on the keyboard.

Good luck getting a reservation at Prune. Gabrielle Hamilton's book is a click away. It will do nicely while you wait.

Her life is an interesting story; however I did not enjoy reading the book and wanted badly to like her and the book. It's endless complaining about other people, places and things. It becomes tedious reading how the world has done her wrong, people are too slow, too pedestrian, or a purveyor calls her "hun" and gets cut off, or no one is as dedicated as her, and the worst is she expected her husband to read her mind and emotions without ever sharing them with him or her loved ones. Always something she finds wrong and unhappy in every experience!
At least every experience she shared in this book is filled with her misery.

In reality she does know she is a woman of great privilege with so much love around her, but she always sounds like she is on the verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown since the day her mother left PA. The mom moved to Vermont, teenager "Prune" hated Vermont, so she went back to dad and attended boarding school by her dad's house. What's wrong with that, entire she never shares what it felt like.

To me her childhood is filled with magic and wonder because of her mother and dad, her whole life is built on the originality of having a parents like hers, but she is seething at them as an adult why so angry at them for it, look at the amazing things she could do and the public accolades for her life's work, she brings people so much joy but she has none herself and people make her miserable.


The part where she visits her mother in Vermont as an adult with her newborn son and husband is excruciating to read because of Hamilton's lack of insight to what is really bugging her (she never shares it with her readers). Hamilton's unrelenting nastiness in that visit is right below the surface without ever voicing why she is so unhappy. I hope the author never ever has to experience anything that her mother has with the death of a son and grown children not talking to her in her lifetime. Heartbreaking the level of contempt she has for her mother's sorrow over her brother's death is too painful to read, where is her tenderness, insight, empathy or sensitivity, something towards her mother but contempt. I'm left with the question why? It seems as if this overshadows her whole life as she works from that place of contempt.