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

Sigh, I loved this book. Not to be snotty but I feel like if you are an industry person you will appreciate her life so much more. Some say she is crass but, that's how chefs are! That's how they need to be, especially in New York. She didn't sugar coat her life or her upbringing, and I have so much respect for that. She worked really hard and put in the hours to become who she is, and success found her. I've often wondered if I would meet my Michele, and have those summers that she did, I sort of hope I do. Bravo Gabrielle for an honest and detailed history of your life and for such a delicious story that had me nodding and smiling often.

The subtitle of Blood, Bone & Butter is "The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef." It should have been "The Incidental Education of an Insufferable Chef." I get it: cooks are crazy. Everyone knows this. And Gabrielle Hamilton, the author of this book, is no exception. She had a neglectful upbringing, found out that she could work in kitchens even if it wasn't what she really wanted to do, and spent time in NY getting in all kinds of trouble, like many restaurant workers do. Then she took a left turn and decided she wanted to do something more "important" and went and got an MFA in creative writing, and then ended up back in the restaurant business. This sounds kind of interesting, but this lady -- oh, this lady. She is a piece of show more work. I don't mind, or even prefer, a memoir that isn't strictly about the work. What else goes on in our lives often has a lot to do with how we end up where we are, so I am perfectly fine with personal life mixed in liberally. But when I finish the book and I'm not even sure what her successful New York restaurant is like, aside from small and that it serves brunch, I don't think it's a really successful book about a restaurateur.

Instead, here's what I know about Gabrielle Hamilton: she hates women who shop at farmer's markets. She had lesbian relationships until she married an Italian guy. She is terrible at relationships - she had an affair with said Italian guy while dating a woman, who she broke up with by informing her she was getting married. She married the Italian so he could get a green card. (Although ultimately who is in that marriage for more than that, and who is most disappointed by the whole thing, and who is more at fault and why are we still talking about it is all up for debate.) She thinks people who let their kids cry it out are miserable excuses for human beings, but she will yell "things I'm not proud of" at her fussy toddlers in the car when she's hungry. She is a chef, but cannot correctly pronounce "turmeric" or "pho." She also has a habit of pronouncing "a" like "ay," including at the beginning of the word "another," so that I felt like she was reading to a particularly slow 4-year-old. I mean really - who says "ay" person and then "ay"nother?!

I suppose the bottom line is, I did not like this woman, and I felt like the book focused on all the wrong things in all the wrong ways. I wish she had stuck to cooking and skipped the MFA. show less

from Shei:

I ate this book up. And this I rarely do (eat books, that is). Let me preface my review by saying that I am enamored with food and cooking and memoir writing. So when a piece of literature delves into the travails of chefdom without flinching, I gulp it down fast.

Gabrielle Hoffman's memoir Blood, Bones and Butter is so much more than about this love of mine. It's about family and love and lack thereof. It's about a search for a self narrated with an unforgiving honesty and assertiveness that serve as the fuel to turn page after page -- until you run out and tell yourself to go to her restaurant Prune at some point in time. I especially liked her mini tirade on the issue of being a female chef and how it should be a non-issue. show more Her account of André Soltner making an omelette inspired me to follow suit in this fashion. I eat the omelette with more fervor now; now it's your turn to eat the book. show less

This is promoted as food writing, with a glowing Bourdain endorsement, but it's really a personal memoir of someone whose life is food. The chapters are almost independent vignettes, beautifully written, each a non-fiction short story. From her rural childhood to setting up her restaurant to visits to Italy with her hopeless husband, you're drawn into her world and the food at the middle of it.

Gabrielle Hamilton is a study in contradiction. She's a lesbian married to a man, a woman loving woman who in her thirties hates her mother with the white hot heat of a teenager; a food lover who thinks her cooking was improved by days of hunger while traveling through Europe; a female chef who has no patience for women who whine about being female in a man's world at one point yet at another point demonstrates just what there is to complain about and has a predominantly female staff; a woman who breastfeeds her two boys for a year each while working punishingly long hours at her restaurant. She is above all a woman with a diamond hard work ethic working as a chef for a catering company while she gets her MFA at the "Harvard of the show more Midwest", physically herself cleaning out a filthy, rat infested, rotten food filled restaurant to start her own famous restaurant in New York, cooking all day then climbing barefoot into 25 foot trees to cut a view to the ocean for her Italian mother in law.

I love it when an author can show the contradictions inherent in humanity, and Gabrielle Hamilton does it well. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read about food and hard work and who is comfortable dealing with human ambiguity. show less

It was a little disorienting how she would jump around in time, skipping 20 years here and then dropping a scene from that skipped time into a later chapter. Plus, what kind of author/chef skips the part where they travel the world? That's one of the most fun and interesting things people do in life, and she glossed it with a list of countries she hit and a few pages talking about how depressing Europe is in the winter.

The lovelessness, the inability to talk deeply and chat lightly, the staying together for family (his family, which she adored and didn't want to lose) even after all emotion had turned to hard resentment and dislike - all of this made her marriage feel like it was straight out of the 1950s, which was deeply unsettling. show more Since her marriage was involved in about 50% of the book, I was unsettled for that much of the book.

So why the four stars? First, I loved the descriptions of her early family life. Second, I love the descriptions of her husband's family, food, houses, kitchens, and Sunday lunches. Third, her descriptions of catering were fun and interesting. And finally, she is just really damn interesting.

Oh yeah, and this: "People who know me well understand fully what I am saying when I suggest that I am working an appetite and that we'd best be making our move. This means it is time to hit the road before my blood sugar - what's left of it - crashes to that point where I'm going to RUIN YOUR FUCKING DAY." Girrrrl, been there. Like every single weekend. show less

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 show more 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.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less