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Gabrielle Hamilton, Cooking With Words

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By Frank Bruni

• March 11, 2011

It’s hard to think of another American chef who has outdone Gabrielle Hamilton in converting the humblest of stages into the heftiest of reputations. The restaurant she opened in downtown Manhattan in 1999, Prune, has barely enough room for the 30 diners it squeezes in at brunch, lunch and dinner, and despite the reliable presence of dozens of additional customers waiting on the sidewalk, she has either escaped or resisted the itch for expansion that so many of her contemporaries scratch and scratch. Prune has no annex or uptown sibling; there is no Prune Dubai. Just this one cramped, irresistible nook with its scuffed floors, nicked tables and servers in pink.

And yet Hamilton’s renown among, and even beyond, the food cognoscenti is huge. That’s principally because what she has championed at Prune — hearty comfort food prepared to a gourmet’s standards and served in a manner so unceremonious that the utensils don’t always match — foreshadowed some of the most prominent dining trends of the day. It owes something as well to her success as a woman in a field still dominated by men. But there’s another explanation: Hamilton can write. For many years now, she has popped up in prominent publications as the author of eloquent, spirited glimpses into the heart, mind and sweaty labor of a chef. So the growing ranks of the restaurant-obsessed have been able to feast not only on her deviled eggs but also on her prose.

After much anticipation, the inevitable memoir has arrived. “Blood, Bones and Butter” traces nearly all of Hamilton’s life and career, from an unmoored childhood through her triumph at Prune, which didn’t end the search for a sense of place and peace that is the overarching theme of this autobiography, as of so many others. It’s a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable, and what it lacks in urgency (and even, on occasion, forthrightness) it makes up for in the shimmer of Hamilton’s best writing.

Recalling her mother’s penchant for heavy eyeliner, she flashes back to “the smell of the sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil.” Hamilton invokes the “voluptuous blanket of summer night humidity,” captures the tantalizing promise of delicate ravioli by observing that “you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain,” and compares breast feeding to being cannibalized, “not in huge monster-gore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf.”

There are rhapsodic passages aplenty about eating and cooking, and while such reveries can easily seem forced or trite, hers ring sweetly true. She’s recounting actual rapture, not contriving its facsimile on cue. You can feel her amazement as her father roasts whole lambs on a spit and her awe at the dexterity with which the chef André Soltner pulls off a perfect omelet, using only a fork. Readers with limited appetites for food porn, beware. This is one salacious expedition into the folds of orecchiette and fine points of puntarelle. Hamilton’s obvious belief that all the world can be refracted through its edible components is so complete that it leads, in a few instances, to sentences that almost come across as satires of food writing. “I had no clue that my parents were unhappy with each other until I was sweeping up cornichons and hard salami and radishes off the kitchen floor” is the opening line of a chapter chronicling her parents’ breakup. Her family is coming apart, and still she’s taking inventory of their larder.

That happens early in the book, following an account of growing up in a bucolic part of Pennsylvania along the Delaware River, and it flags the onset of drift and delinquency. During Hamilton’s teenage years, her parents are often gone or distracted, and at times she’s left to fend for herself. She lies about her age to get dishwashing work. She steals. And by age 16, she’s made her way to Manhattan, an early graduate from an alternative high school doing battle with the platoons of cockroaches in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment she shares with her older sister.

She winds up waiting tables, and that, along with the dishwashing, establishes the book’s main leitmotif: time and again she is drawn — pulled, really — back to the world of food and hospitality. It happens even when she struggles against it, a battle suggested by the book’s subtitle, “The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.” Economic necessity is the proximal reason, but not the real one. Through feeding people Hamilton exerts control over a life rendered chaotic and undependable when her parents split; she takes care of others in the way her parents didn’t take care of her. This is clearest in her description of opening Prune, which illuminates how much more than menu planning goes into the creation of a restaurant. Hamilton is guided by nostalgia and yearning, and wants above all to forge an emotional connection with her guests.

She’s funny about the pretensions of other restaurants, proclaiming that Prune would “never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.” And she’s blunt about the moment-to-moment drudgery of running the place. While Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” only purported to deglamorize restaurant work, then went on to give it a naughty, swashbuckling romanticism, Hamilton takes you out back behind Prune, where, all alone, she discovers and disposes of a rat swollen with maggots. No sane reader will aspire to this.

She is blunt as well about how tedious she finds discussions of gender in the workplace, how insufferable she considers the self-satisfied milieu at the farmers’ market and how surreal, ludicrous and, yes, exhilarating she deems the celebrity-chef treatment. But that candor draws attention to its absence on other fronts. For many years she is coupled and, according to a throwaway phrase, madly in love with a woman she meets while in Michigan to do graduate work in creative writing, but she says little else about the relationship, and doesn’t wrestle in a satisfying way with the questions raised by her affair with, then marriage to, a man. He and she live apart even after the birth of their two children, and this arrangement is initially addressed with a frustrating casualness. Even later, when she examines the marriage further, it remains opaque, though his Italian lineage and their sojourns in Apulia give her the material for the last, too leisurely quarter of the book.

Hamilton may, justifiably, not want her focus to swerve from the kitchen to the bedroom, but she winds up seeming selectively guarded and evasive, and maybe a bit careless. In many places the book cries out for connective tissue that’s missing, and there are specific omissions that throw a reader off balance. Although elated by her entry into that graduate program, Hamilton doesn’t say what she writes there — even as she’s being caustically dismissive of her classmates’ efforts. And when her mother reappears in the book after a long absence, Hamilton vents a fury at her that she hasn’t set the stage for.

A more general anger and even disdain for other people’s vanities and inconsistencies flicker throughout the book. They undercut her likability as a narrator, though she’s redeemed time and again by her self-reliance, her industriousness and her observant, clever storytelling. She notes that less than a week after tackling the maggoty rat, she was on her way in a black town car to Martha Stewart’s television show for a cooking demonstration. And she returns toward the end of the book to those ravioli, revealing only then that what lay inside was terrible. Her timing is perfect, her metaphor clear and her point indisputable. Sometimes pasta and people don’t make good on all the hope you have invested in them.

BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER

The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef.

By Gabrielle Hamilton

291 pp. Random House. $26.

Frank Bruni, a former restaurant critic for The Times, is the author of “Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite.”

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BLOOD, BONES, AND BUTTER

The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef.

by Gabrielle Hamilton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2011

After initially disdaining a career in food as one devoid of “meaning and purpose,” she finds both here.

In this provocative debut, a renowned chef finds her fulfillment as a writer.

Though a passion for food provides Hamilton’s theme and focus, her passion for writing distinguishes this memoir from similar behind-the-kitchen volumes. In fact, her accomplishment as the owner and chef of Prune, in New York City, seems less like destiny than the result of a series of detours, from the broken family that left her to support herself with a series of food jobs since her early teens, when petty crime and casual drugs also marked her life, through her on-again/off-again college studies that culminated in an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan. “I was not looking to open a restaurant,” she writes of the quixotic leap she made into the profession—despite never having worked as a chef, written a business plan or had any idea of the legal processes involved in converting an abandoned space into a tiny bistro that would quickly come to gross almost $2 million a year. While the centerpiece of the book is an amazing chapter that finds the foundation of Prune—its spirit of hospitality—in her experiences as an impoverished international vagabond, the restaurant provides only one dimension of the narrative’s richness. In a manner that is never glib or sentimental, Hamilton proceeds from the childhood innocence of her family’s unraveling through the life of a precocious hustler for whom introspection was a luxury through the romantic complications of leaving her longtime female lover for the Italian man she would marry. This union that would provide her with something like the family she had lost decades earlier, but a marriage that would prove both turbulent and unconventional (the couple had two children in their first seven years of marriage without living together).

Pub Date: March 8, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6872-2

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010

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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

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ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

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Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

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Book Review – Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is a memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton. She takes us on a journey from her childhood growing up in Pennsylvania with her parents and siblings. Early in the book, her parents separate and this throws her life into chaos. Between her mother’s move to Vermont to find herself and her father’s distracted parenting, she found herself on her own from her early teenage years. She quickly finds herself embroiled in adult situations with alcohol and drugs, which continued when she moved to New York and found work in a restaurant at 16. She decided to return to school when she got a scare from being arrested in New York.

Gabrielle developed an early appreciation for food from spending a lot of time with her French mother who appreciated good food. This gave Gabrielle the confidence to work in food preparation and at restaurants once she needed to find a job. Without formal training, she developed her skills to work in catering. Although she studied literature, looking for an alternative to working with food, she has remained in the industry and owns a restaurant in NY called Prune, where she is a co-chef with her wife.

A Kind of Love Story

Along the way, Gabrielle married Michele. Despite being married and having two children, they lived separately for 6 or 7 years. Their marriage was motivated by his need for a green card. This is not a fairy tale. After years of yearly visits to Italy to visit Michele’s family, Gabrielle continued to feel estranged from her husband. Eventually, they divorce.

Gabrielle Gets Things Done

In current parlance, we would say Gabrielle is a maker. She talks about the thrill of getting her hands dirty, going barefoot, building a fire to roast an animal for food, climbing trees to prune them, etc. She opened a restaurant without ever having been a chef in one. Her mother-in-law called her brave and courageous for flying to Italy with her children, and all her other achievements and experiences pay witness to this.

“I trim at least six trees, bracing myself in their crotches in the hot summer sun, cursing and grimacing, trying to hold on with one hand and work the clippers with the other.”

Gabrielle comes across as a critic of people who fight a certain way, eat a certain way, or live a certain way. I think that would make it difficult for us to be friends if there even was the chance. While I might not scoff at her choice to eat rabbit, she might scoff at my refusal to do so. Perhaps I have misread the tone of sections of the book, but that is the impression that I got.

“I hate hating women but double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrases me. I ordered a plain filtered coffee, as if I was apologizing on behalf of my gender.”

Themes Explored

Themes explored in Blood, Bones & Butter include expectation versus reality, choices and consequences, intercultural relationships, family dynamics and relationships, and sexuality. Here are several quotes from the book that highlight some of its themes.

On providing structure – “Someone has to stay in the kitchen and do the bones of the thing, to make sure it stands up, and if it’s you, so be it.”

On women in the food industry – Gabrielle participated as a panelist in a conference at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York on “Where Are the Women”. She writes that the “topic’s a dinosaur” but then goes on to give several examples of situations that demonstrate that it’s not.

On the inevitability of her marriage’s demise – “Michele had failed to blanche the pancetta and additionally had overseasoned the ravioli filling and so those several dozen handmade gorgeous little beauties, which looked so enticing and appealing from the outside, went to waste as we opened them and took out the filling and ate only the few bites we could salvage of the empty pasta alone with the butter and sage. I should have paid attention to that.”

On in-law relationships – “I don’t know if anyone in the family knows me or likes me, but I like them. Without language, I am left hyper, acutely tuned in to tone and body language and I can never trust my observations fully. People smile and seem happy to see us.”

On cultural differences, patience, and merging lives – “… I am chucking the mealy-moth-infested crap that I have known to be living in this crazy cabinet since the day I arrived here seven years ago. I feel it is appropriately respectful to have waited this long though I admit it was a challenge for me not to have at this cabinet five years ago.”

On desire versus reality – “I just want my vacation in Italy with my Italian husband to feel like what it sounds like.”

Recommendation

I thought Blood, Bones & Butter would be like A Homemade Life  by Molly Wizenberg, In some ways it is, because they both explore the author’s life through her relationship with food and cooking, and both authors experience loss and grief of different types. Molly’s stories center around food, as a way to access her memories. Cooking is central in Gabrielle’s life, but the stories do not revolve around sharing and eating food.

Should you read Blood, Bones & Butter ? The story kept my interest and I enjoyed it. Read it if any of the themes explored interest you, if you like memoirs, or if you’re just looking for an interesting book. This memoir is as honest as a memoir can be, told from a single perspective. I was mostly entertained by it. While it is sad in parts, I did not cry. The author is occasionally self-righteous and sometimes critical of others. Who of us isn’t like that sometimes?

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BookBrowse Reviews Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

Blood, Bones & Butter

The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Biography & Memoir
• Mid-Atlantic, USA
• New York State
• 20th Century (multiple decades)
• Contemporary
• Parenting & Families
• Coming of Age
• Dealing with Loss
• Strong Women
• Top Books of 2011

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Memoir: The life of a New York City chef

Readers beware - Chef Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter , is smoking hot! Serving it up raw and gritty, Hamilton is absolutely fearless as she narrates the chapters of her life. From her idyllic childhood as a girl in rural Pennsylvania, to the tough renegade chef presently rocking New York City's East Village, Hamilton dishes it out from page one with her edgy literary style. The "blood" of the book's title refers to her family, and Hamilton firmly establishes her ties to both her parents and her four older siblings who, together, "ran in a pack - like wild dogs." As a child, Hamilton was captivated by her artistic parents and drank them in in great, awe-filled gulps. "My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then. I could not have boasted of them more or said my name, first and last together, more proudly, to show how it directly linked me to them. I loved that our mother was French... that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she married my father." She tenderly takes her time to lay out the foundation that both forms Gabrielle as a child and shatters Hamilton as an adult. She warmly observes and absorbs the discerning cooking style of her mother, and from her father "learn[s] how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends." Through the simple joy of recalling childhood memories, Hamilton establishes her family bond, and no event makes a deeper impression on young Gabrielle than that of her father's legendary annual lamb-roast. It is in this magical "feast" for hundreds of friends from "as far away as the townhouses of New York City" that Hamilton's familial and culinary sensibilities become inextricably bound. When Hamilton's parents suddenly split up, Gabrielle is left alone amidst the broken bones of her family. Cash-strapped and a mere thirteen-years-old, she begins to work the only way she knows how. Hamilton grinds her way through kitchen after kitchen from New York to Ann Arbor, through Europe, and back again. And ultimately, the all-nighters, crusty floors, endless prepping, and the sordid yet seductive world of food all serve to sharpen her artistic skills and caustic wit. Blood, Bones & Butter is not just for foodies. Though you will find seasoned passages on "ceviche and Israeli couscous and mushroom duxelle and robiola cheese" among others to relish, they merely serve to strengthen and fortify Hamilton's solid story threads. Be warned, however, that Hamilton writes like a rock star; her style is not for the faint of heart and she makes no apologies for who she is. Her smacking, straight-up honesty is highly acidic and a bit hard to take at times, but every page holds a killer quote and Hamilton's hard-core intensity is intoxicating. Blood, Bones & Butter has serious moxie driven by the love and language of all things culinary, and its promise of family, friendship, and food is sure to please.

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Beyond the Book:    Chef Gabrielle Hamilton's Restaurant: Prune

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Book Review: Blood, Bones & Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton

Please try again

Radishes with butter and sea salt, grilled lamb sausages, smoky eggplant and flatbread: just the kind of snacks you might expect, ready to be paired with a glass of Champagne or an expertly made Negroni at the tiny bar of a French-inspired, chef-owned bistro like Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune in New York City. But wait, sardines ? Canned? Served with Triscuits and mustard?

When I lived in New York, quirky little Prune was a favorite restaurant of mine. Dinners there were brightly lit but festive, and whole sunny Sunday afternoons could float by in the wake of their justifiably famous Bloody Marys. But every time I walked in, my brain snagged on those sardines. They'd been on the bar menu since the place opened, and they never budged. There had to be a story there.

And there is, but not the one you'd might expect. Hamilton, as she tells it in her memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef , grew up during the early 70s in a sprawling, bohemian family in rural Pennsylvania, the Jersey border right across the river--five kids running wild, dad a set designer and scenic artist for trade shows and theaters, mom a perfectionist Frenchwoman who made her own cassoulet and served her bisteeya the proper Moroccan way, with olive-and-orange salad and sweet mint tea.

The book begins We threw a party (and what else, really, does the staff of a restaurant do every night?), describing in loving and vivid detail the lamb roast her father orchestrated in the meadow behind their house every summer, in a voice that's funny, sharp, and profane. Telling the story of the party, Hamilton brings her family and her adolescent world into focus, only to let us know, in passing, that she remembers this party and its preparations so well only because it was the last moment before everything fell apart.

By the time Hamilton was 12, her parents had split up, her mom fleeing to Vermont, her dad working on failed shows ( Got Tu Go Disco !) and nearly broke. As she recalls it, she and her 17-year-old brother Simon were left, parentless and cashless, to their own devices. Dinner meant whatever she could scrounge from the garden and the remains of her mother's pantry.

I ate canned sardines and chewed through the spines and the silvery unpleasant skin until I finally realized how to skin and filet them gently with a paring knife, placing the meaty bodies on horribly stale Triscuit crackers with sliced shallots and mayonnaise. I washed lettuce from the garden in warm water so my hands wouldn't get cold and watched it wilt but ate it anyway.

Soon, at 13, she was walking to the tourist restaurants in town, talking her way into bussing jobs by claiming to be 16. She works as a busser, waitress, and eventually cook at a place "called, ironically, Mother's." Work, to her, means freedom. "No future graduate-level feminism seminar would ever come within a mile of the force of that first paycheck. The conviction was instant and forever: If I pay my own way, I go my own way."

And go her own way she does, to New York City in the crazy 80s, where she starts waitressing at The Lone Star Cafe, a hotter-than-hot urban-cowboy nightclub and restaurant. She turns 17 there, working a scam with the other waitresses and bartenders to pocket something like 90K in cash--almost all of it, she notes, quickly spent on drugs, especially cocaine, which fueled both frenetic hours on the job and equally frenzied nights out afterwards. She got busted, but gos lucky: a lawyer friend of her brother's finds out she's still a juvenile and works a deal, as long as she agrees to get out of New York City, fast, and enroll in college. Some more string-pulling ensues, and she ends up at Hampshire College, an earnestly progressive, no-grades liberal arts school in New England, where she lasts for all of five semesters before moving first back home and then back to New York City.

Here, the story starts skipping forward and back. The comfort of kitchens becomes the grind of a decade as a freelance catering-chef-for-hire, working grueling shifts for the big high-end catering companies feeding the city's nouveau high society. Years, it seems, go by in a fluorescent-lit blur of plastic-wrapped racks full of salmon pinwheels.

There are frank, Bourdain-like rants about the grossness of professional kitchens, about the interchangeability of the cooks, and how sheer stamina becomes the only thing she and her co-workers can brag of. There's a brief respite in the shape of a summer camp, where she cooks for several bucolic years, feeding, among others, the appreciative, food-smart young daughter of New York Times' writer Mark Bittman, and a bleak foray into a graduate writing program at the University of Michigan, which she longs for, then despises, and eventually makes her peace with, mostly thanks to another restaurant job where she cooks for cash and sanity, re-establishing her place in the world away from her jargon-spouting, comfortably privileged fellow writers.

Eventually, of course, we get to the real meat of the book: the surprisingly off-the-cuff way she starts Prune, her own restaurant, and gets it up and running. As any chef can tell you, owning and cooking at your own restaurant is a 25-hour-a-day job, and Hamilton has not only the restaurant but two kids. So, perhaps it's not surprising that the book feels more and more fragmented as it goes along. Here's Hamilton, undertaking the truly grisly job of clearing out the rotting remains of the space's previous tenant, a failed restaurant whose owners had split the year before without taking out so much as a bag of garbage.

Then, suddenly, here she is getting married to one of her male customers, an Italian doctor, after an obliquely described affair that splits up Hamilton and her longtime girlfriend. He needs the marriage for visa purposes, but their love affair is a real one--except that he pulls away almost the moment they head to Europe for their honeymoon. Yet they stay, nominally, together, having 2 sons but uniting only for a yearly trip to visit his family at their villa in Italy.

A long flashback to a solo backpacking trip through Europe and beyond explains the emotional back stories to much of the food on Hamilton's menus. Structurally, though, it feels shoehorned in. Hamilton is a smart and accomplished writer, but she seems exhausted or simply unwilling to reveal as much as a memoir demands, nor does she quite have a handle on the solid, novel-shaped arc and structure that the form requires at its best.

Engaging and observant, she zeros in on small details, such as how, due to blood-sugar issues based in "too many years of going all day without eating, that freakish thing about restaurant work," she desperately needs to have "some orange juice, iced Ovaltine, and a full quart of ice-cold Coca-Cola down my throat in seconds, and in that particular order" at least twice during every brunch shift (wherein, by the way, exactly "192 Thomas's English muffins" and "1440 eggs" are consumed). We learn all about crazies living upstairs, and how one complains about the music while another stands around bare-chested and gesticulating in front of the restaurant's windows. We get a meticulous description of the warm, perfectly waxy yellow potato that accompanied a ham sandwich she ate on a freezing, lonely day in a cafe in Amsterdam. But when it comes to the big questions, she sketches in the issues, then keeps her head down and her mouth shut.

Were this a novel, a reader might expect to eventually find out why such a tough and opinionated main character stays married for so long to a man she describes angrily as distant, impersonal, and disengaged. Why did this man pursue her so ardently, then cool off abruptly without letting her go? Previously a lesbian, does she miss her relationships with women? Why did she cut her supposedly adored mother completely out of her life for 20 years? Why all those soul-sucking years in catering?

And why, with all the other dirtier, tougher, more glamorous jobs out there, do we still long to devour the inside dish on a restaurant chef? Hamilton's not telling. But she sure knows how to throw a damn good party.

Listen to clips of Gabrielle Hamilton reading from the Blood, Bones, & Butter audiobook which she narrated herself : Opening Prune (describes the first time seeing the Prune space and her decision to open a restaurant, 6:02 run time)

Female Chefs (about speaking to the students at CIA about the state of women in the industry, 4:25 run time)

Gabrielle Hamilton will be signing books at the Left Bank in Larkspur, followed by a four-course dinner. Tickets are $100/person and include dinner, wine, and a copy of the book. She will also be signing books at Camino in Oakland on Fri., Mar. 11, at 6pm, followed by dinner at 7pm. Tickets are $100/person and include cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, dinner, and wine. She will be doing a free reading at Omnivore Books in San Francisco on Sat., Mar. 12 at 3pm .

KQED The Writers' Block Interview: Q+A with Gabrielle Hamilton

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Blood, bones, & butter : the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef

If you have ever toyed with the idea of being a chef or a cook, or have had the urge to own a restaurant, especially after watching one of those ubiquitous competition-style tv shows, you might want to think about the reality of a life in food beyond a few hours of a contrived reality. Better yet read this autobiography of a chef and restaurant owner who got into this line of work without a plan or formal training.

This is an autobiography about family and food written with a passionate intensity for life and work by Gabrielle Hamilton: cook, reluctant chef/restaurant owner of Prune, wife, mother and writer. The book opens with the story of her early family life and concludes with two other families: the restaurant family of workers plus customers, and the other personal family that is fraying around the edges. It is to those families, past and present, that the book is dedicated and they inspire the title: they are her blood, bones and sweet butter in life.

The book is an attempt to make sense of a life lived in a whirlwind of activity and turmoil. She begins with her first twelve years in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, where her father was a major stage-set designer and builder. Her elegant French mother, a former New York City Ballet dancer, ruled the house with glamour and a knowledge about food-- how to prepare it, stretch the best out of the least expensive and desirable and make it the tastiest in the very best tradition of French home cooking. Hamilton was the youngest of five children. And then suddenly it was all over with the family splitting up. This thirteen-year-old girl's behavior was edging toward delinquency--breaking into houses, stealing, shoplifting, lying about her age to get a first job at a local restaurant where she washed dishes, did prep-work, and began to learn how to cook.

And as the years go on, she waits tables, learns through the necessity of work how to do a variety of cooking for all types of clients: New York catering firms that hire teams of cooks who produce large quantities of poor quality chi-chi food that passes for haute cuisine; chief cook at a summer camp where every year she scrubs down the kitchen from stem to stern, sets up the orders for massive amounts of food and caters to the tastes of young campers. It is when she travels to Europe and connects with her distant French family that she begins to experience the kind of food that will eventually be served at her restaurant. And finally in Greece, at the end of the port on the small island of Serifos, she has her food epiphany in Margarita's small restaurant where the wine is homemade and so is the food--freshly made every day. This is the food of family and place that offers both sustenance to the body and to the soul.

Along the way, she marries an Italian doctor who was seduced by the food at the restaurant and, in turn, seduces this erstwhile lesbian who marries him so that he can get his green card. Their marriage produces two children and an extended family in Italy where once again it is food that becomes a prime focus of Hamilton's life. Her mother-in-law, the eighty-year-old matriarch, Alda Fuortes de Nitto, cooks vegetables from the garden that she tends, dresses them simply with the buttery tasting olive oil produced from the family's grove, and with little knowledge of each other's languages, she and Hamilton communicate through cooking.

Somewhere in her writing or in an interview, Julia Child stated that she loved everything about cooking--the preparation, the cooking and cleanup--all of it! In many ways that is a description of being in love and making love, and that is what it takes to do this kind of work day in and day out, for better or for worse, which Hamilton conveys with joy, reflection, insight and wisdom.

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Blood, Bones, and Butter

The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Gabrielle Hamilton | 3.92 | 33,250 ratings and reviews

Ranked #20 in Chef , Ranked #23 in Food — see more rankings .

Rankings by Category

Blood, Bones, and Butter is ranked in the following categories:

• #90 in Cooking
• #60 in Restaurant

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If you like Blood, Bones, and Butter, check out these similar top-rated books:

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Book review: “Blood, Bones, and Butter”

Do not, under any circumstances, read “Blood, Bones, and Butter” while you are hungry. Gabrielle Hamilton’s food descriptions can be so luscious and vivid that you will feel compelled to devour anything edible in front of you regardless of age or species (including, but no limited to, sleeping roommates and week-old scrambled eggs). Make sure you have munchies nearby to satisfy your raging palate, then get comfortable and dig in.

The first half of “Blood, Bones, and Butter” is a fast-paced torrent of glittering youth, image after image piled high with beauty and significance. Gabrielle grew up in the “burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill” with an artist father, a ballerina mother, and a veritable warren of older siblings. Her early life was spent gamboling through the forest of legs grown from glamorous people at lavish parties, or sweating in the heat of her mother’s six-burner kitchen. Then, as her parents’ marriage disintegrates and she is left on her own (in an abandoned mill at age âÄù3? Oh for the days before child services!) darkness replaces the light.

The darkness is thick and choking for Gabrielle, but smooth and ever-moving for the reader. She travels to the big city for a fast-paced life of coke and booze, losing track of dreams but building a reservoir of experience. Then, at the nadir of her existence she breaks, and runs off to find herself (if there is indeed any self left) in the towns of Europe.

Gabrielle gets her life together, goes to a school (an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Michigan grad school? Not bad, Ms. Cokehound), and starts living a steady life of catering gigs and summer camp chef-ery. Eventually she moves back to New York, starts an immediately world-famous restaurant on a whim, and marries a motorcycle-riding Italian doctor. Is that the perfect Cinderalla story or what, folks?

Spoiler alert: read no further if you want to be surprised by Gabrielle’s lack of fulfillment in her new life as Top Chef/Supermom.

The difference between the first half of the book (childhood through to restaurant opening) and the second is astounding. Gabrielle’s life is mediated by food, by cooking, by the culinary creations of the people around her. Her emotions are expressed through braised rabbits and fresh vegetables, the kinked hands of an old French chef crafting a perfect omelette with just a fork and decades of utter compassion. If the production of a plump Italian eggplant is slow, natural, and surrounded by love then Gabrielle is happy, if food is ironic or shallow or unfelt then the author pines. The cruel and utter irony of the book is that Gabrielle loses touch with food when she starts Prune (her restaurant) and her family, that food becomes a given and not a wonder.

When Gabrielle is stuck in the deepest trenches of apathy during her teenage years, some safety line of braided, handmade spaghetti is always thrown down to tow her up. Food brings wonder and joy enough to change her course, and sometimes enough pain to do the same. There is one particularly brutal scene wherein a bunch of stoned summer camp counselors “liberate” her torpor-ridden lobsters into fresh water. The sea-creatures start to drown and crawl out over the floor, leaving a trail of mangled bodies for her to find in the morning. She never goes back.

Somehow, when food (on her own terms) becomes a central part of Gabrielle’s life, it loses its emotional power. She cooks what she wants as head chef at Prune, yet can only complain about the constant hours of back-breaking labor. She spends hours a day basking in the sight and scent of perfect cuisine, yet harps on her blood-sugar issues constantly. She has children of her own to feed and nourish, and they become a burden (albeit a much-loved one) in conjunction with her endless hours and loveless marriage (getting married to a man so he can get his green card rarely works out, ladies). Food is no longer powerful, except as a medium for conflict and power struggles, a metaphor for failures and strange futures.

Gabrielle does love her life as a chef, it seems, and certainly writes beautifully enough about food to show that it still holds a deep place in her heart. Is it merely nostalgia, then, that drives the dichotomy between her past and present? Or did the movement, inconstancy, and adventure of her past create the proper scenario for revelations and great emotional apotheoses? I do not know which part of her is more real, the Bourdain or the Martha Stewart, but regardless or where her own truth lies the truth of the book is evident: food is a great human medium, the connection between individuals and the land they inhabit. It has an amazing power if used correctly, and will be our undoing if it remains ignored. It also makes for great writing, and in turn, a huge [expletive] appetite.

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Book review: ‘Blood, Bones & Butter’ delectable when chef Hamilton’s in charge

A strange image graces the cover of Gabrielle Hamilton’s luminous new memoir, “ Blood, Bones & Butter .” At first glance it might be an oyster, slipping off its half shell and nestled in some kind of grassy nest, with a pearl at its center and frills underneath. Is this the futuristic creation of some modernist chef?

Then you realize that the pearl is an eye and those frills are feathers. Turning the cover upside down reveals the unmistakable head — severed, one assumes — of a glaring, sharp-beaked rooster. Along with the title, it’s the first clue that Hamilton’s story will be visceral and possibly even revelatory.

Sure enough, Hamilton quickly proves that her decade-in-the-making work can live up to the extraordinary “best memoir by a chef ever” hype. That quote, by the way, is from the previous title holder, Anthony Bourdain , whose 2000 blockbuster, “ Kitchen Confidential ,” hilariously deglamorized restaurants while simultaneously feeding the fire of public obsession with celebrity chefs. Hamilton, chef-owner of the tiny Greenwich Village restaurant Prune , shares two of Bourdain’s traits: a wicked, sometimes obscene sense of humor and a past checkered with drug use and crime. But as he admits in his jacket testimonial, she’s the superior writer by a mile.

To read “Blood, Bones & Butter” is to marvel at Hamilton’s masterful facility with language. She turns something as mundane as the deep-frying of “stacks and stacks” of flour tortillas at a touristy Pennsylvania restaurant when she was 15, for instance, into a duo of evocative metaphors: The tortilla “would float and sizzle on the surface for a moment like a lily pad on a pond,” she writes. “Then, with a deep ten-ounce ladle, I pushed down in the center, and the tortilla came up around the bowl like the long dress and underskirts of a Victorian woman who had fallen, fully clothed, into a lake, her skirts billowing up around her heavy sinking body.”

She manages to make an account of killing a chicken just as poetic (if more gruesome). As her dismayed father watched, she spun the bird around to disorient it, laid its head on the block and raised the hatchet: “This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. The bird started to orient.”

Like Bourdain, she strips the work of restaurateuring — and catering before it — down to its least glamorous realities. There are maggot-filled rats to deal with, a neighbor wanting to talk about the water bill during the chaos of the Sunday brunch rush, a line cook giving eight days’ notice when Hamilton is nine months pregnant. The latter led to the following To-Do list:

Get w/AT and limit menu

Train CR on a 2-man line

Call Roode for fill-in?

Tell brunch crew vinaigrette too acidic

Pick up white platters

Change filters in hoods

Figure out pomegranate syrup.

But those are side dishes to Hamilton’s main course: the story of her search for identity and belonging after her parents’ divorce in her early adolescence. Her French mother moved to Vermont, and her father left her and her 17-year-old brother alone for weeks at a time, an abandonment that “may have been an oversight, like leaving your cup of coffee on the roof of the car while you dig out your keys and then drive off.” Whether it was parental influence or not — memories of her father’s lamb roasts and of learning to cook by “opening old jars of stuff my mother had left behind in the pantry” — she gravitated to restaurants, working first as a dishwasher as a young teenager and then on to the line, with a stint as a grifting cocktail waitress thrown in for good measure.

“Blood, Bones & Butter” tells of Hamilton’s drift from “catering hacker” to summer-camp cook to university writing student, listless and searching. She found meaning in the opportunity to open her own restaurant in the spot where a bankrupt one had been fossilizing. She had never even supervised a restaurant kitchen, let alone owned one, and she’s just as surprised as the reader at how brilliant she is at it. It turns out that her biggest source of inspiration, in hindsight anyway, was an aimless backpacking trip through Europe in her 20s, horribly ill-timed in the middle of a miserable winter. She didn’t “stage” in Michelin-starred kitchens like so many driven chef wannabes; she instead drifted, near-penniless, through Greece, Turkey and France, depending on the hospitality of strangers to ease her hunger. She sold cigarettes and lottery tickets at the cash register of a “sports bar cum creperie” in Brittany, where she ate the same meal every day for weeks on end without getting tired of it. “I was sucking something in,” she writes. “Something unmitigated. This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat.”

Those taste memories and others fuel a stripped-down, let’s-just-have-a-dinner-party cooking philosophy that perfectly suited New York in the late 1990s. “There would be no foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry,” she writes.

Of course, Prune was a smash hit, and Hamilton became one of the standard-bearers of a particular type of Manhattan restaurant: small, ingredient-focused, chef-driven. But as attached as she was to the staff at her restaurant, her search for family went on, which might be why she so easily dropped her Michigander girlfriend in favor of an Italian man who “washed up on the shores of the kitchen and landed his sights on me.” She stumbled into marriage as nonchalantly as she had stumbled into cooking, becoming a reluctant wife and mother whose annual trips to visit his family in Puglia sounded appealing when she related them to friends but were becoming ever more stifling in reality.

If you’re hoping the memoir culminates in an Oprah moment, this is not the book for you. Hamilton is too devoted to grit and realism to allow her story to be neatly resolved. In her telling, it’s not so much “ Eat, Pray, Love ” as “Snort, Steal, Cook.” Nonetheless, one of the biggest thrills of “Blood, Bones & Butter” is watching her self-discovery unspool as the independent streak she was forced to nurture at such a young age takes stronger and stronger hold. By the book’s end, she may or may not have found herself, but one thing is clear: She is reluctant no more.

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Yonan is the editor of The Post’s Food and Travel sections.

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Book Review: Blood, Bones & Butter

Hamilton’s memoir is triptych. Bones details her idyllic childhood in rural Pennsylvania and its sudden crash and burn when her parents divorced. She was mostly left to fend for herself at the too-tender age of 12 and began lying about her age in order to work, which is how she was introduced to the restaurant world. Hamilton writes about moving to the dirty New York of the 1980s, waitressing, drug abuse, and a crisis crossroads, which ultimately sent her traveling the world.

Blood is the story of Prune , her much-celebrated restaurant in the East Village that is as tiny and perfect as it was when she opened 10 years ago on impulsive instinct. Butter would really be more aptly described as “Olive Oil” as it focuses on her summer sojourns in Puglia with her husband’s Italian family. Here’s the thing about this book: Hamilton can write. Like really, really write, not just chronicle her life, or be self-aware enough to bring poignancy to her experiences. (She also happens to have an MFA in Fiction.) It’s almost maddening that she can be both a talented chef and such a phenomenal writer. So really, this book is no way limited to those who are interested in food.

The entire narrative unfurls from the magnificent summer lamb roasts her parents would host annually for more than 100 of their friends. Drawing from this, her life’s story becomes an exploration of everything that influenced the menu at Prune. The lamb roasts, the catering jobs, the simple restaurant on a Greek island where she spent a summer, and even her hunger during the long, lean years of Hamilton’s difficult youth. This is why you won’t find froths or food cooked in an immersion circulator at Prune. Her cooking is driven as much by what she has enjoyed as what she craved.

There would be no foam and no “conceptual” or “intellectual” food: just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry.

The lamb roasts of her childhood transcend into the magnificent feasts at the Italian villa where she spends each summer with her beloved mother-in-law. Each year, she begs her husband for the opportunity to cook one of these feasts and annually, he thwarts her efforts. This unfulfilled desire embodies so much of what Hamilton shares with us throughout her memoir.

While many memoirs today feel somewhat ephemeral, I believe Blood, Bones and Butter will stand up for a long time. There’s nothing trendy about Gabrielle Hamilton. Her prose is as smooth as a warm knife through butter and her approach to cooking is timeless.

FTC Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Good Food Stories LLC receives a minuscule commission on all purchases made through Amazon links in our posts.

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Prune is one of my top five favorite restaurants in NYC. I love the place. I look forward to reading the book.

Thanks for recommending this memoir. I will try to find it at our library.

This sounds like a very interesting memoir. And, I will have to stop by her restaurant the next time I’m in the neighborhood!

I have read so many different takes on this book! I understand she is an exquisite writer.

Sounds like a cool memoir. I’ll have to look for this.

How did I manage not to eat at Prune while in NYC for 10 months? I’m abashed and need to return. Great review.

What a great review – my kind of book and author. I’ll scout out a copy. And Prune is my new favorite restaurant name.

Prune – which means “plum” in French – was Gabrielle’s childhood nickname. Adorable, yes?

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Blood, bones & butter: the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef audible audiobook – unabridged.

New York Times best seller.

A New York Times Notable Book.

Named one of the best books of the year by The Miami Herald , Newsday , The Huffington Post , Financial Times , GQ , Slat e, Men’s Journal , Washington Examiner , Publishers Weekly , Kirkus Reviews , National Post , The Toronto Star , BookPage , and Bookreporter .

"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".

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent 20 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 100 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.

• Listening Length 10 hours and 4 minutes
• Author Gabrielle Hamilton
• Narrator Gabrielle Hamilton
• Audible release date March 1, 2011
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• ASIN B004Q3EZBC
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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