Blood, Bones, and Butter
Ratings25
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings25
Average rating3.5
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. 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; 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 prickly marriage that nonetheless yields lasting dividends. By turns epic and intimate, Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion.
Features a new essay by Gabrielle Hamilton at the back of the book
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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. 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.
I thoroughly enjoyed this richly-written memoire. I happen to know the extended family and worked at the private high school she attended so I was familiar with lots of this book.
What I loved most was that I learned a lot about food, geography and Italian. I wished I had read this on an e-reader so I could instantly look up many of the words and expressions Gabrielle wrote.
Highly recommend. Just loved it.
The first few chapters (BLOOD) were ROUGH for a vegetarian, let me tell you! But I got through the butchery and overall really enjoyed this. It reminded me a little of [b:The Glass Castle 7445 The Glass Castle Jeannette Walls https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1400930557s/7445.jpg 2944133] meets [b:Relish: My Life in the Kitchen 15786110 Relish My Life in the Kitchen Lucy Knisley https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1345686126s/15786110.jpg 21505033].Sidenote: after I finished this I immediately googled to see if she and her husband had gotten divorced... apparently not. I wonder if he read this book??
Maybe it's just bald-faced jealousy that taints my opinion. I mean here is an author with a MFA in fiction writing with articles appearing in GQ, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, not to mention a best selling book and the chef/owner of the very successful, if oddly named, Prune in the East Village. But in the end it just feels all a little too...
It comes off like Gwyneth Paltrow experiencing things at a level us mere plebes can only play at. Gabrielle Hamilton has been there done that. Drunk at 13, coke at 16 then off to backpack Europe to come back to a prime offer of running her own restaurant with no real prior experience. In the meantime this “staunch Marxist feminist, budding lesbian, black nationalist sympathizer, and literacy advocate” goes off and marries a tall, dark Italian doctor with his own villa, ironically of course.
Maybe what rankles is that I'm just too much the suburban foodie wannabe that plagues the industry with my uninformed opinions on taste.
“There is a way, a distinct way, that people who work in the industry speak to each other about food and you can tell, within minutes, that they are part of your extended clan. It's not like an obnoxious foodie talks about food, ostentatiously throwing around kitchen terms and names of ingredients they have researched at length. it's not like an appreciative eater talks about food - awed and enamored and perfectly happy to speak of his enjoyment without having any idea of what he's just eaten or how it was achieved. It's the way only someone who works in the industry talks about food, by almost not talking about it, but just throwing out a few code words and signals - like a gang member flashing you his sign. Every single time that I sit at a restaurant's bar, order the txacoli or gruner veltliner rather than the sauvignon blanc, ask for the razor clams and not the calamari, I am sniffed out immediately by the server as an industry peer, having said nothing.”
Or lamenting the state of cheese.
“I am grateful for the burratta, to be sure ...In fact, I have finally understood that we will not be eating burratta in the US anymore, because even the best that you get at Agata and Valentina, “fresh off the airplane” is not it. You can't eat burratta in the States because it can't stay fresh long enough to make the journey. it is always a hair sour and just starting to harden and it turns watery and “off” not matter how “just flown in from Bari” the wholesaler at Murray's insists it is.”
So yeah food porn galore, I just couldn't escape the whiff of condescension on my behalf.
