Blood, Bones and
Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Gabrielle Hamilton
This memoir was
the February selection of “The Huffington Post” book club. I anticipated that this would be a similar
book to Heat, Bill Buford’s hilarious
account of his year of apprenticeship in a New York restaurant kitchen. Gabrielle Hamilton’s book is much more,
however. It is a coming of age story, a
search-for-life’s meaning memoir and a primer in food preparation all rolled
into one delectable package.
Blood, Bones and Butter is divided
into three more or less distinct sections.
In the first part, the author describes a counter-cultural
upbringing. Her mother is French and
loves to cook. She has an almost magical
power of being able to create a meal out of any available ingredients. Her father is an artist of sorts, working as
a set designer for theaters in northern New Jersey. Gabrielle is exposed to a Bohemian lifestyle
of backyard parties featuring roasted lamb, fancy pasta and vegetable salads
prepared by her mother as well as large volumes of wine and marijuana. Gabrielle and her siblings are abandoned by
their parents when she is about 12. A
divorce sends her mother into an emotional shell. Mom eventually retreats to a new home in
Vermont leaving the “care” of the children to her irresponsible
ex-husband. Gabrielle attends
alternative education schools popular in the 70s and finishes secondary school
at age 16. She supports herself with a
series of jobs in local restaurants, starting out busing tables and mopping
floors. She also begins a drug habit and
supplements her meager income by shoplifting.
After graduation Gabrielle moves in with her older sister in
Manhattan. She works in bars and learns
how to skim money from the customers by destroying some charge tickets and
pocketing the money. She also learns to
recreationally enjoy cocaine and realizes that she is a lesbian. She is eventually caught stealing by her boss
and reaches a plea bargain since she was
underage for working as a barmaid.
Gabrielle straightens herself out to some degree, at least enough to
complete an undergraduate degree, all the while working in more restaurants and
learning how to cook on the fly. Following college she travels the globe for
the better part of two years, experiencing many new and different things,
particularly unique food and food preparation.
When she returns to New York, she incorporates much of what she learned
on these travels into her cooking career.
She works as a contract chef for
large catering companies in New York, a job which consumes eighteen to twenty hours
per day and leaves her creatively and professionally unfulfilled.
Gabrielle describes
her life at this point as “a piece of performance art.” She feels no sense of purpose and decides
that what she really wants to be is a writer.
She has a glorified view of what the life of a poet/artist/writer would
be like (undoubtedly influenced by her upbringing) and applies to multiple MFA
programs. She is accepted to and decides
to attend the program at the University of Michigan, even though she had never
been to the Midwest. She develops a
resentment towards the other students in her program,
finding them to be effete pseudo-intellectuals.
Gabrielle takes another chef job to help ends meet and finds herself catering
huge tailgate parties. Her culinary
creations are limited to barbecue, big slabs of beef and sandwiches. She finishes the MFA program but quickly
decides she misses “The City” and moves back to New York. She finds herself absorbed back into the
hectic contract chef business when an opportunity to open her own restaurant
presents itself. She works night and day
to figure out how to run a small business and opens her now famous restaurant
“Prune” in the East Village. The story
digresses here a bit as Gabrielle writes of the difficulties of being female in a business dominated by males. This
concludes the second section of Blood,
Bones and Butter.
It is in the
third section of the book where the author’s creative writing talent really
shines. She describes the endless,
grueling work running Prune but her sense of accomplishment rings through here
as well. One of her regular customers, a
male Italian research physician begins to court her and, to everyone’s surprise
they marry. They maintain separate
residences and careers but manage to conceive two sons. Gabrielle and her husband take off every July
and travel to Italy to spend time with his family. Over the years Gabrielle learns the simple pleasures
of country Italian living and especially cooking. She describes one shopping trip in the small
town:
“Then I go to the market.
On this, the first day back in Leuca, I am happy to see some my old
favorites again: the puntarelle, the Leccese green beans, the small dense
zucchini, and the eggplant. I buy big
bundles of all of them and lots of peaches and a watermelon. Alda eats fruit after each meal and I think
my kids will eat the watermelon. The
meat is dismal as usual but there is a fish stall with some good-looking
stuff. I get an octopus. A ranzino.
A few pounds of head-on shrimp.”
Despite a
language barrier she forms a very strong bond with her mother-in-law Alda. It
is in this extended family of eccentrics and very uncomplicated but contented
folks that the author finds peace with herself, her own family and her
career.
This
book was a total joy to read. The images
that the author creates of Italy are outstanding. She draws very detailed character sketches
using a paucity of words and descriptions.
I would recommend this book highly to anyone who enjoys food, cooking, travel
and in particular, fine writing
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