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

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Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 • Slate • Men’s Journal • Washington Examiner • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • National Post • The Toronto Star • BookPage • Bookreporter

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

Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

Winner of the 2012 James Beard Foundation Award for Writing & Literature

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Discover Great New Writers

The owner of a prestigious Manhattan restaurant describes her inadvertent education as a very reluctant chef.

*****

Once a year, Hamilton's perennially destitute father threw a huge lamb roast at the family's ramshackle Pennsylvania farmhouse. On that night the family slept under the stars, and all the comforts of life seemed plentiful: food, wine, a roaring bonfire, family, friends — and love.

When Hamilton was twelve, her parents split up and inexplicably left, leaving her to fend for herself in a Dickensian subsistence of lowly jobs, alcohol, drugs, and theft. In her late teens, she began the slow process of healing through food in a tiny café owned by a relative. "I was sucking something in. Something unmitigated. This is the crepe. This is the cider. This is how we live and eat."

After years of soul-sapping catering jobs, Hamilton opened her own East Village restaurant. "I wanted . . . the marrow bones my mother made . . . brown butcher paper on the tables . . . jelly jars for wine glasses . . ." she writes. "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."

If Blood, Bones, and Butter were a recipe, it would be five-star, celebrated for its perfect balance of bravery and humility, its liberating sense of joy seasoned with pervading childhood loneliness. The book is as perfect a memoir counterpart to Hamilton's menu at Prune as can be imagined: warm, savory, and addictive; the pure, distilled essence of courage and honesty.

Publishers Weekly

Owner and chef of New York's Prune restaurant, Hamilton also happens to be a trained writer (M.F.A., University of Michigan) and fashions an addictive memoir of her unorthodox trajectory to becoming a chef. The youngest of five siblings born to a French mother who cooked "tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones" in a good skirt, high heels, and apron, and an artist father who made the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, Hamilton spent her early years in a vast old house on the rural Pennsylvania–New Jersey border. With the divorce of her parents when she was an adolescent, the author was largely left to her own devices, working at odd jobs in restaurants. Peeling potatoes and scraping plates—"And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start." At age 16, in 1981, she got a job waiting tables at New York's Lone Star Cafe, and when caught stealing another waitress's check, she was nearly charged with grand larceny. After years of working as a "grunt" freelance caterer and going back to school to learn to write (inspired by a National Book Foundation conference she was catering), Hamilton unexpectedly started up her no-nonsense, comfort-food Prune in a charming space in the East Village in 1999. Hamilton can be refreshingly thorny (especially when it comes to her reluctance to embrace the "foodie" world), yet she is also as frank and unpretentious as her menu—and speaks openly about marrying an Italian man (despite being a lesbian), mostly to cook with his priceless Old World mother in Italy. (Mar.)

More Reviews (6) Fewer Reviews

dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com

'a book that threatens to raise the stakes for the American chef memoir in the same way that Patti Smith’s spellbinding, National Book Award-winning "Just Kids" upped the literary ante for the rock & roll memoir.' http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/stop-this-grill-i-want-to-get-off-or-do-i/

The New York Times

"Though Ms. Hamilton's brilliantly written new memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, is rhapsodic about food — in every variety, from the humble egg-on-a-roll sandwich served by Greek delis in New York to more esoteric things like 'fried zucchini agrodolce with fresh mint and hot chili flakes’ — the book is hardly just for foodies. Ms. Hamilton, who has an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, is as evocative writing about people and places as she is at writing about cooking, and her memoir does as dazzling a job of summoning her lost childhood as Mary Karr's "Liars' Club" and Andre Aciman’s "Out of Egypt" did with theirs.”--(Michiko Kakutani)

Joe Yonan

…luminous…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…Hamilton…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 masterly facility with language.
—The Washington Post

Michiko Kakutani

Though Ms. Hamilton's brilliantly written new memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, is rhapsodic about food…the book is hardly just for foodies. Ms. Hamilton…is as evocative writing about people and places as she is at writing about cooking, and her memoir does as dazzling a job of summoning her lost childhood as Mary Karr's Liars' Club and Andre Aciman's Out of Egypt did with theirs.
—The New York Times

O Magazine

"A memoir that flings open the kitchen door to expose the backbreaking toil and passionate obsession of a world-class chef."

TIME.COM

“Blood, Bones & Butter, more than any book I know, captures the essence of contemporary cool when it comes to food. This is what you'd read if you came here from another country (or from another decade) and wanted to know what people valued in dining…. Her vision is so aptly and evocatively written that it's hard not to succumb to its rough-hewn glamour. So preferable to the corporatized alternatives most Americans are stuck with — in both city and country alike — which is one reason for the book's almost certain success. And if Blood, Bones & Butter isn't made into a movie in the next 12 days, I will eat stilted food in sterile dining rooms for a week.”

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781400068722
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 3/1/2011
Pages: 304
Sales rank: 18,111
Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, and Food & Wine. Hamilton has also authored the 8-week Chef Column in The New York Times, and her work has been anthologized in six volumes of Best Food Writing. She has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and the Food Network, among other television. She lives in Manhattan with her two sons.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring lamb roast, and we roasted four or five whole little guys who each weighed only about forty pounds over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people. Our house was in a rural part of Pennsylvania and was not really a house at all but a wild castle built into the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill, and our backyard was not a regular yard but a meandering meadow, with a creek running through it and wild geese living in it and a Death Slide cable that ran from high on an oak to the bank of the stream and deposited you, shrieking, into the shallow water. Our town shared a border so closely with New Jersey that we could and did walk back and forth between the two states several times in a day by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie's in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams's Mobil on the New Hope side. In the afternoons after school on the Pennsylvania side, I walked over to the Jersey side and got guitar lessons at Les Parson's guitar shop.

That part of the world, heavily touristed as it was, was an important location of many events in the American Revolutionary War. George Washington crossed the Delaware here, to victory at the Battle of Trenton, trudging through the snowy woods and surprising the British in spite of some of his troops missing proper shoes, their feet instead wrapped in newspaper and burlap. But now my hometown has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities of small mansions that look somewhat like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. Each housing development has a "country" name-Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle Crossing, Deer Path-which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building them. There is now a McDonalds and a Kmart- but when I was growing up, you had to ride your bike about a mile down a very dark country road thick with night insects stinging your face to even find a plugged-in Coke machine where you could buy a vended soda for thirty-five cents. Outside Cal's Collision Repair in the middle of the night that machine glowed like something almost religious. You can now buy a Coke twenty-four hours a day at half a dozen places.

But when I was young, where I lived was mostly farmland, rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year- old stone barns. It was a beautiful, rough, but lush setting for the backyard party my parents threw with jug wine and spit-roasted lambs and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. The creek dividing the meadow meandered and, at its deepest bend, was lined with small weeping willows that grew as we grew and bent their long, willowy, tearful branches down over the water. We would braid a bunch of the branches together to make a Tarzan kind of vine rope that we could swing on, out over the stream in our laceless sneakers and bathing suits, and land in the creek. That is where we chilled all of the wines and beers and sodas for the party.

We were five kids in my family, and I am the youngest. We ran in a pack-to school, home from school, and after dinner at dusk-like wild dogs. If the Mellman kids were allowed out and the Bentley boys, the Drevers, and the Shanks across the street as well, our pack numbered fifteen. We spent all of our time out of doors in mud suits, snowsuits, or bare feet, depending on the weather. Even in "nature," running around in the benign woods and hedges and streams, diving in and out of tall grasses and brambles, playing a nighttime game that involved dodging the oncoming headlights of an approaching occasional car, bombing the red shale rocks down into the stream from the narrow bridge near our driveway to watch them shatter-we found rough and not innocent pastimes. We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning.

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 and that she had given me that heritage in my very name. I loved telling people that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she married my father. I loved being able to spell her long French name, M-A-D-E-L-E- I-N-E, which had exactly as many letters in it as my own. My mother wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, and I remember the smell of the sulphur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist every morning and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron that I have never seen her without in forty years. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us all to eat dark, briny, wrinkled olives, small birds we would have liked as pets, and cheeses that looked like they might well bear Legionnaire's Disease.

Her kitchen, over thirty years ago, long before it was common, had a two-bin stainless steel restaurant sink and a six-burner Garland stove. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pots and casseroles, scuffed and blackened, were constantly at work on the back three burners cooking things with tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones-whatever was budgeted from our dad's sporadic and mercurial artist's income-that she was stewing and braising and simmering to feed our family of seven. Our kitchen table was a big round piece of butcher block where we both ate and prepared casual meals.

My mother knew how to get everything comestible from a shin or neck of some animal; how to use a knife, how to cure a cast-iron pan. She taught us to articulate the "s" in salade nicoise and the soup vichyssoise, so that we wouldn't sound like other Americans who didn't know that the vowel "e" after the consonant "s" in French means that you say the "s" out loud.

And yet I remember the lamb roast as my father's party. I recall it was really his gig. With an art degree from Rhode Island School of Design on his office wall, two union cards-stagehands and scenic artists-in his wallet, five able-bodied children, a French wife, and a photograph torn from a magazine of two Yugoslav guys roasting a lamb over a pit, he created a legendary party-a feast that almost two hundred people came to every year from as far away as the townhouses of New York City and as near as our local elementary school.

My dad could not cook at all. He was then a set designer for theatrical and trade shows and he had a "design and build" studio in Lambertville-the town where he himself had grown up, the town where his own father had been the local country doctor. We kids were forever running into people who'd say, "Your granddaddy delivered all three of my sons!" Or, "Your granddaddy drove a Cadillac! One of the very few cars at the time in Lambertville!"

After growing up in that small rural town, my dad, the youngest son, went away to college and then to art school. He came back with a mustache, a green Mustang, and a charcoal gray suit and installed himself there, in his hometown. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the dead end of South Union Street with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor. In that building he started his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be built, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped off to the city for load-in. Every year when he got the job to build the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus there, we would go after school and zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws and canvas and paint. We would run up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out like in a carpet store, and dip our hands into oil drums full of glitter. Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter-the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop-and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth.

We made our Halloween costumes out of lighting gels, backstage black velour curtaining, scrim, and Mylar. When we went with our father to see the actual circus at Madison Square Garden, we spent almost the whole show backstage where we met Mishu: The Smallest Man in the World, and petted the long velvety truncks of the elephants in jeweled headdresses. We met Gunther, the lion tamer, and marveled at his blond blond hair and his deep deep tan and, giggling like the children we were, his amazing ass-high and round and firm, like two Easter hams-in electric blue tights.

I associate my dad almost exclusively with that lamb roast because he could dream it up and create the scenery of it. My dad has an eye for things. He can look at the stone rubble covered in scaffolding that is the Acropolis, for example, and without effort, complete the picture in its entirety, right down to what people are wearing, doing, and saying. In his mind's eye, out of one crumbling Doric column, he can visualize the entire city, its denizens and smells, the assembly's agenda and the potted shrubs. Where the rest of us saw only the empty overgrown meadow behind our house, riddled with gopher holes, with a shallow, muddy stream running through it and a splintering wooden wagon that I had almost outgrown, he saw his friends: artists and teachers and butchers, scenic painters and Russian lighting designers, ship captains and hardware merchants all with a glass in hand, their laughter rising high above our heads and then evaporating into the canopy of maple leaves; the weeping willows shedding their leaf tears down the banks of the stream; fireflies and bagpipers arriving through the low clinging humidity of summer; a giant pit with four spring lambs roasting over apple-wood coals; the smell of wood smoke hanging in the moist summer nighttime air. I mean it. He sees it all romantic like that.

He says, about all of his work, "Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn't fall down. I do the romance."

It must have been my mother, the cook, who was in the kitchen with the six burners and the two-bin sink making the lima bean salad and the asparagus vinaigrette and the all-butter shortcakes, counting out the stacks of paper plates with the help of my older sister-the two of them doing "the bones" as my father called it. But it was from him- with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, his packet of unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck)-from him we learned 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. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

There was a Russian Winter Ball, I remember, for which my dad got refrigerator-sized cartons of artificial snow shipped in from Texas and a dry ice machine to fog up the rooms and make the setting feel like a scene from Dr. Zhivago. And there was a Valentine's Day Lovers' Dinner, at which my father had hundreds of choux paste éclair swans with little pastry wings and necks and slivered almond beaks that, when toasted, became their signature black. He set them out swimming in pairs on a Plexiglas mirror "pond" the size of a king's matrimonial bed with confectioner's sugar snow drifts on the banks.

"Swans," he pointed out, "mate for life."

For a kind of Moroccan-themed party that my parents threw, my dad built low couches from sheets of plywood and covered them with huge fur blankets and orange velour brought home from the studio. By the time the candles were lit and the electric lights extinguished, the whole house looked like a place where the estimable harem of a great pasha might assemble to offer their man pomegranates, pistachios, and maybe more carnal treasures. There were tapestries and kilims stacked as tall as me, where adults stoned on spiced wine and pigeon pies could lounge. By the time that party really got rolling, I remember walking from room to dimly lit room feeling acutely the ethos of the era-the early 1970s-as if it, too, were sprawled out on the "scene shop" couch wearing long hair and a macramé dress, barely noticing how late it was and that I was still up.

But the lamb roast was not a heavily themed and elaborately staged one- off. It was, as parties in our family went, a simple party, thrown every year, produced with just a fire and a sheet of plywood set over sawhorses for the carving of the lambs. We built a fire in our shallow pit, about eight feet long and six feet wide. It's possible that my dad dug it alone, but if there was an available sixteen-year-old around, like his son, my oldest brother Jeffrey, it's very likely that they dug it together. At each end of the pit they set up a short wall of cinder blocks with a heavy wooden plank on top, looking like the head and baseboards of a giant bed, where the long wooden poles onto which the baby lambs had been lashed would rest. The baby lambs, with their little crooked sets of teeth and milky eyes, were slaughtered and dressed up at Maresca's Butchers, then tied onto ten-foot poles made of ash because the branches of an ash tree grow so straight that you can skewer a baby lamb with them easily.

Jeffrey had a driver's license and a 1957 Chevy truck with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. It had big dangling side-view mirrors and torn upholstery over which we threw a mover's blanket, but it ran. So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black's Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy's shoes with no socks, hanging on as tight as I could to the railings and letting the wind blast my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the wind and the little patches of bracing coolness and the sudden bright sunshine and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. We passed brand-new deer emerging from the woods and standing in herds of forty in the wide open cornfields. Finally we got to Johnson's Apple Orchard where we picked up our wood for the fire.

First Chapter

Blood, Bones & Butter

The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

By Gabrielle Hamilton

Random House

Copyright © 2011 Gabrielle Hamilton
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781400068722

Chapter 1

We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring lamb roast, and we roasted four or five whole little guys who each weighed only about forty pounds over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people. Our house was in a rural part of Pennsylvania and was not really a house at all but a wild castle built into the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill, and our backyard was not a regular yard but a meandering meadow, with a creek running through it and wild geese living in it and a Death Slide cable that ran from high on an oak to the bank of the stream and deposited you, shrieking, into the shallow water. Our town shared a border so closely with New Jersey that we could and did walk back and forth between the two states several times in a day by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie's in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams's Mobil on the New Hope side. In the afternoons after school on the Pennsylvania side, I walked over to the Jersey side and got guitar lessons at Les Parson's guitar shop.

That part of the world, heavily touristed as it was, was an important location of many events in the American Revolutionary War. George Washington crossed the Delaware here, to victory at the Battle of Trenton, trudging through the snowy woods and surprising the British in spite of some of his troops missing proper shoes, their feet instead wrapped in newspaper and burlap. But now my hometown has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities of small mansions that look somewhat like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. Each housing development has a "country" name-Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle Crossing, Deer Path-which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building them. There is now a McDonalds and a Kmart- but when I was growing up, you had to ride your bike about a mile down a very dark country road thick with night insects stinging your face to even find a plugged-in Coke machine where you could buy a vended soda for thirty-five cents. Outside Cal's Collision Repair in the middle of the night that machine glowed like something almost religious. You can now buy a Coke twenty-four hours a day at half a dozen places.

But when I was young, where I lived was mostly farmland, rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year- old stone barns. It was a beautiful, rough, but lush setting for the backyard party my parents threw with jug wine and spit-roasted lambs and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. The creek dividing the meadow meandered and, at its deepest bend, was lined with small weeping willows that grew as we grew and bent their long, willowy, tearful branches down over the water. We would braid a bunch of the branches together to make a Tarzan kind of vine rope that we could swing on, out over the stream in our laceless sneakers and bathing suits, and land in the creek. That is where we chilled all of the wines and beers and sodas for the party.

We were five kids in my family, and I am the youngest. We ran in a pack-to school, home from school, and after dinner at dusk-like wild dogs. If the Mellman kids were allowed out and the Bentley boys, the Drevers, and the Shanks across the street as well, our pack numbered fifteen. We spent all of our time out of doors in mud suits, snowsuits, or bare feet, depending on the weather. Even in "nature," running around in the benign woods and hedges and streams, diving in and out of tall grasses and brambles, playing a nighttime game that involved dodging the oncoming headlights of an approaching occasional car, bombing the red shale rocks down into the stream from the narrow bridge near our driveway to watch them shatter-we found rough and not innocent pastimes. We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning.

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 and that she had given me that heritage in my very name. I loved telling people that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she married my father. I loved being able to spell her long French name, M-A-D-E-L-E- I-N-E, which had exactly as many letters in it as my own. My mother wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, and I remember the smell of the sulphur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist every morning and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron that I have never seen her without in forty years. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us all to eat dark, briny, wrinkled olives, small birds we would have liked as pets, and cheeses that looked like they might well bear Legionnaire's Disease.

Her kitchen, over thirty years ago, long before it was common, had a two-bin stainless steel restaurant sink and a six-burner Garland stove. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pots and casseroles, scuffed and blackened, were constantly at work on the back three burners cooking things with tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones-whatever was budgeted from our dad's sporadic and mercurial artist's income-that she was stewing and braising and simmering to feed our family of seven. Our kitchen table was a big round piece of butcher block where we both ate and prepared casual meals.

My mother knew how to get everything comestible from a shin or neck of some animal; how to use a knife, how to cure a cast-iron pan. She taught us to articulate the "s" in salade nicoise and the soup vichyssoise, so that we wouldn't sound like other Americans who didn't know that the vowel "e" after the consonant "s" in French means that you say the "s" out loud.

And yet I remember the lamb roast as my father's party. I recall it was really his gig. With an art degree from Rhode Island School of Design on his office wall, two union cards-stagehands and scenic artists-in his wallet, five able-bodied children, a French wife, and a photograph torn from a magazine of two Yugoslav guys roasting a lamb over a pit, he created a legendary party-a feast that almost two hundred people came to every year from as far away as the townhouses of New York City and as near as our local elementary school.

My dad could not cook at all. He was then a set designer for theatrical and trade shows and he had a "design and build" studio in Lambertville-the town where he himself had grown up, the town where his own father had been the local country doctor. We kids were forever running into people who'd say, "Your granddaddy delivered all three of my sons!" Or, "Your granddaddy drove a Cadillac! One of the very few cars at the time in Lambertville!"

After growing up in that small rural town, my dad, the youngest son, went away to college and then to art school. He came back with a mustache, a green Mustang, and a charcoal gray suit and installed himself there, in his hometown. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the dead end of South Union Street with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor. In that building he started his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be built, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped off to the city for load-in. Every year when he got the job to build the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus there, we would go after school and zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws and canvas and paint. We would run up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out like in a carpet store, and dip our hands into oil drums full of glitter. Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter-the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop-and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth.

We made our Halloween costumes out of lighting gels, backstage black velour curtaining, scrim, and Mylar. When we went with our father to see the actual circus at Madison Square Garden, we spent almost the whole show backstage where we met Mishu: The Smallest Man in the World, and petted the long velvety truncks of the elephants in jeweled headdresses. We met Gunther, the lion tamer, and marveled at his blond blond hair and his deep deep tan and, giggling like the children we were, his amazing ass-high and round and firm, like two Easter hams-in electric blue tights.

I associate my dad almost exclusively with that lamb roast because he could dream it up and create the scenery of it. My dad has an eye for things. He can look at the stone rubble covered in scaffolding that is the Acropolis, for example, and without effort, complete the picture in its entirety, right down to what people are wearing, doing, and saying. In his mind's eye, out of one crumbling Doric column, he can visualize the entire city, its denizens and smells, the assembly's agenda and the potted shrubs. Where the rest of us saw only the empty overgrown meadow behind our house, riddled with gopher holes, with a shallow, muddy stream running through it and a splintering wooden wagon that I had almost outgrown, he saw his friends: artists and teachers and butchers, scenic painters and Russian lighting designers, ship captains and hardware merchants all with a glass in hand, their laughter rising high above our heads and then evaporating into the canopy of maple leaves; the weeping willows shedding their leaf tears down the banks of the stream; fireflies and bagpipers arriving through the low clinging humidity of summer; a giant pit with four spring lambs roasting over apple-wood coals; the smell of wood smoke hanging in the moist summer nighttime air. I mean it. He sees it all romantic like that.

He says, about all of his work, "Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn't fall down. I do the romance."

It must have been my mother, the cook, who was in the kitchen with the six burners and the two-bin sink making the lima bean salad and the asparagus vinaigrette and the all-butter shortcakes, counting out the stacks of paper plates with the help of my older sister-the two of them doing "the bones" as my father called it. But it was from him- with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, his packet of unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck)-from him we learned 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. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.

There was a Russian Winter Ball, I remember, for which my dad got refrigerator-sized cartons of artificial snow shipped in from Texas and a dry ice machine to fog up the rooms and make the setting feel like a scene from Dr. Zhivago. And there was a Valentine's Day Lovers' Dinner, at which my father had hundreds of choux paste éclair swans with little pastry wings and necks and slivered almond beaks that, when toasted, became their signature black. He set them out swimming in pairs on a Plexiglas mirror "pond" the size of a king's matrimonial bed with confectioner's sugar snow drifts on the banks.

"Swans," he pointed out, "mate for life."

For a kind of Moroccan-themed party that my parents threw, my dad built low couches from sheets of plywood and covered them with huge fur blankets and orange velour brought home from the studio. By the time the candles were lit and the electric lights extinguished, the whole house looked like a place where the estimable harem of a great pasha might assemble to offer their man pomegranates, pistachios, and maybe more carnal treasures. There were tapestries and kilims stacked as tall as me, where adults stoned on spiced wine and pigeon pies could lounge. By the time that party really got rolling, I remember walking from room to dimly lit room feeling acutely the ethos of the era-the early 1970s-as if it, too, were sprawled out on the "scene shop" couch wearing long hair and a macramé dress, barely noticing how late it was and that I was still up.

But the lamb roast was not a heavily themed and elaborately staged one- off. It was, as parties in our family went, a simple party, thrown every year, produced with just a fire and a sheet of plywood set over sawhorses for the carving of the lambs. We built a fire in our shallow pit, about eight feet long and six feet wide. It's possible that my dad dug it alone, but if there was an available sixteen-year-old around, like his son, my oldest brother Jeffrey, it's very likely that they dug it together. At each end of the pit they set up a short wall of cinder blocks with a heavy wooden plank on top, looking like the head and baseboards of a giant bed, where the long wooden poles onto which the baby lambs had been lashed would rest. The baby lambs, with their little crooked sets of teeth and milky eyes, were slaughtered and dressed up at Maresca's Butchers, then tied onto ten-foot poles made of ash because the branches of an ash tree grow so straight that you can skewer a baby lamb with them easily.

Jeffrey had a driver's license and a 1957 Chevy truck with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. It had big dangling side-view mirrors and torn upholstery over which we threw a mover's blanket, but it ran. So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black's Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy's shoes with no socks, hanging on as tight as I could to the railings and letting the wind blast my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the wind and the little patches of bracing coolness and the sudden bright sunshine and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. We passed brand-new deer emerging from the woods and standing in herds of forty in the wide open cornfields. Finally we got to Johnson's Apple Orchard where we picked up our wood for the fire.

Continues...

Excerpted from Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton Copyright © 2011 by Gabrielle Hamilton. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reading Group Guide

1. What does food mean to the author? How did your particular attitude toward food develop?

2. What challenges do writers and chefs share? Are they unique to those professions?

3. What saved the author from a life of substance abuse and crime?

4. Gabrielle Hamilton’s mother-in-law is a central figure in her book. Why did she become so important for her? Do you have someone equally important in your own life?

5. Being invited by Misty Callies to prep for a large dinner party and, later, to work at her restaurant were milestones for Gabrielle Hamilton. Why were these experiences significant for her?

6. Gabrielle Hamilton writes about her ambivalence in wedding her husband. Why do you think she married him? Have you ever felt similarly about your own relationships?

7. Getting one’s needs met is a recurring theme. How do you think Gabrielle Hamilton feels about this and how has it influenced her journey?

8. Is Blood, Bones & Butter a funny book?

9. Many have commented on the “honesty” of the book, suggesting that such candor and intimacy are uncommon. Are readers mostly responding to the way Gabrielle Hamilton writes about her own family or does that “honesty” manifest elsewhere? What is her point or objective in being so forthcoming? Do you think you would be so upfront in your own memoir?

10. Did you like/not like the ending and why?

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5

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C_Rouillard

Posted March 13, 2011

Meh.

I really can't give this book more than a moderate recommendation.

For every great chapter, full of the author's obvious love for food and life, there's another where she seems to be nothing more than a conceited, entitled snot who walks on other people, but expects some respect from them (and, in turn, from the reader).

The book seems to swing at both ends of this polarity, and I swing, too, from really liking the author, and having a vested interest in the outcome, to disliking her, and wishing she'd just shut the hell up. It makes parts of the book a wonderful, fast-paced read, but others a torturous slog through page after page of self-appreciative drivel.

But for the one-half-to-two-thirds I really liked, I can give a high recommendation. Unfortunately, the other 50%, I can't. So, I'm purely middle-of-the-road on this book (sadly, because I really WANTED to enjoy it)

8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
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Frisbeesage

Posted May 1, 2011

Overall an interesting story with some nice foodie tidbits, but lacking the depth I was hoping for.

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of the acclaimed New York restaurant Prune. In Blood, Bones and Butter she chronicles how she ended up a famous chef giving lectures in cooking schools and running a successful restaurant. Gabrielle grew up in a big, boisterous, unconventional family with a French mother and an unreliable, artistic father. Both her parents taught her to love food, so when the family split up and she was a teenager at loose ends and needing money, she went to work in a restaurant. Through all kinds of turmoil and instability Gabrielle clung to food as the one thing she could count on. As many others have pointed out Blood, Bones, and Butter is more about Gabrielle's neglectful childhood and subsequent struggles than it is about food. When she is describing food she does so beautifully with a sort of melancholic nostalgia that is very appealing. I loved the early scenes about her father's outdoor parties and all the preparation that went into them. However much of the book is written in the vein of - I grew up doing drugs, stealing stuff for the fun of it, generally being a badass, aren't I cool. I have read too many of these type of stories to be very impressed anymore. The best memoirs tend to come from the author's ability to dig deep and come to some stark truths about their own motivations and mistakes and end with the feeling that the author is headed in a better direction. Gabrielle seems to leave out the deep parts, somehow skimming over the astonishing changes her life has undergone. How did a lesbian, in a committed and passionate relationship, suddenly find herself married with two kids? How did she go from years of defeated drudgery in the catering kitchens to suddenly having her own, successful restaurant? I would have loved to see the emotional transitions that must have taken place for these things to happen, but I feel like Gabrielle was unwilling to make herself that vulnerable to her audience. Overall an interesting story with some nice foodie tidbits, but lacking the depth I was hoping for.

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted July 27, 2011

Not my favorite

The writing itself is good. However, the author just seems to constantly whine about her life which gets very tiresome.

4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
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imcnulty

Posted July 8, 2011

self serving book with nothing to learn about cooking

If you're looking to learn about professional cooking and running a restuarant, this is not the book for you. More about how the author pulled herself up by her bootstraps despite her parents,etc. I thought it was very boring and was sorry I wasted my money on this.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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wattfarms

Posted March 10, 2011

Highly recommended-such an honest, from the gut, read!

This book is exhilarating to read. It is unlike any other I have experienced. And you do experience this book as if you were with Gabrielle as she endures the total desertion by her parents at a young age and as she travels and becomes educated from and by so many situations and opportunities in her life. The result is the ownership of her own NYC restaurant, Prune. You can feel each unpleasant and each wonderful moment that leads to her development. As she trips through her daily evolutions becoming such a knowledgeable chef, not from intentionally studying the business, but from immersing herself from childhood in the wonders and glories of food and its myriad of historical and more recent combinations, you can visualize and almost taste what she savors with each bite. This is such a fine read!

2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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BooksNBeans

Posted March 7, 2012

more from this reviewer

It seems fitting that a book that is different from most should

It seems fitting that a book that is different from most should have a review that's different than most. This review is a collaborated effort, as it's a compilation of 20 opinions with the rating being the calculated average (3 1/2 out of 5), but with one person "authoring" it.

Blood, Bones, & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
by Gabrielle Hamilton turned out to be a book perfect for a book club discussion. There were so many topics to discuss starting with her childhood, her parents, her siblings, her adolescent years of crime, her lifelong love-hate relationship with cooking, the confusion her "wish-washy" sexuality caused, her adult years as a person, her constant desire and need for a family, and of course her experiences as a restaurant owner.

Though the majority of the ratings fell to the middle, with areas of the book being really well-liked and other areas being really despised, there were a few that positively loved the book and were balanced by those that absolutely hated it. The opinions varied so heavily in the discussion that it's really difficult to pin down where BB&B did well and where it failed to appeal to the reader. But let's give it our best try.

My personal opinion is, that regardless of whether you end up loving or hating the book, Hamilton's bravery at producing a book that analyzes her entire life is to be commended. How many of us would be able to put our life out there for the world to judge? How many would be as blatantly honest? Would you be tempted to gloss over certain events and choices, or would you be able to let all the ugly and undesirable hang out there?

Her overall writing style (voice) was enjoyed with the majority of the readers appreciating that she was open and sincere in her revelations, even when they failed to put her in a better light. Though her failing to stick to a chronological sequence was a source of contention. The overall agreement being that it made the story a little harder to follow at times, and it made the book seem less like a professional publication and more like a set of journal entries slapped together.

As for the story itself, this was another area where opinions varied greatly. For some the focus on the food and the food experiences were the better way to go, for others the better focus was the life story itself. No matter what camp a reader was in they felt that there was too much of the other and that it took away from the "true" story. There was only one who appreciated the intertwining of the two as it is a "perfect illustration of how they intertwine in Hamilton's life". This was acknowledged as a very valid point.

The last point of agreement was the ending, no one felt the story held itself up through to the end. The overall consensus was that it just fizzled out. However, the small section at the back discussing the status of Hamilton's marriage and her status with the Italian side of the family was largely appreciated. It was a moment of absolute frustration when we though the book had ending with no closure on either subject. *Note*: I don't know if this section is in other editions of the books, it's not labeled as an epilogue or anything, it's just sort of there. This particular edition was the Random House Reader's Circle with the little gold circle on the front.

I hope this compilation review helps you get an idea of Blood, Bones, & Butter
and whether it might be something you wish to get your hands on. A high recommendation is for it to be a book club read, as it was done here. It is absolutely perfect for creating discussion!

*Disclosure: I received this book for free in exchange for using it as a book club read and a review*

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Barnesie

Posted February 27, 2012

more from this reviewer

More Memoir then Chef's Memoir

It's not until halfway through Blood, Bones & Butter that Gabrielle Hamilton begins to shed light on the fact that she probably always wanted to be a writer and studied the craft all the way through graduate school. Until that point, her endlessly run-on sentences and colorfully personal descriptions seem to be quite an unexpected talent for a chef to possess. The fact that she studied creative writing with such effort, while continuously and almost accidentally stumbling higher and higher into the culinary world paints a portrait of a would-be writer who took several wrong turns to end up in a kitchen. Readers seeking deep dissertations on culinary techniques or restaurant business mechanics will be disappointed, as it becomes more and more apparent that cooking is less who she is and more an innate part of what her life has become. Eggplant and roasted lamb carcasses may decorate the background, but at its core, Blood Bones and Butter is an unflinching portrait of a woman who has stumbled along in the passenger seat through long corridors of her life to become an accidental chef, an accidental restaurateur, an accidental wife and an accidental Italian adoptee. The journey is an intensely introspective look at a writer who cooks, not a chef that writes, and the unvarnished accounts of selfishness, unrequited expectation and disappointment result in writing that alternates between pictorially charming and self-deprecatingly brave.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 12, 2012

Interesting but not a great read.

This book is a bit confusing just as the life of the author. I forced myself to read it because it was my book club's selection. I found I could pick it up and put it down anytime. The author over described some scenes in the book that were totally over done and perhaps unnecesary. Hamilton's anger is easily conveyed to the reader throughout the book in her bursts of anger and childishness. Her writing is very good but some of the events she describes are crude, some vulgar but also very truthful. I felt some of them could've been left out. Maybe it was for her a cathartic moment that I hope helped her see her life and herself and change. I would say the book is interesting but it did not hold my attention.
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Anonymous

Posted April 10, 2012

Recommended for cooks of passion

There are some gaps in the story between her homosexualtyl and her heterosexual marriage. The story line is wonderful from her childhood cooking experience to her adult culinary accomplishments, if you like to cook.

After completing the read, I certainly understand the title, Blood, Bones, and Butter and it's appropriateness. A quick and fulfilling read for those of us who enjoy any kind of kitchen.
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Anonymous

Posted March 8, 2012

A walk down memory lane for locals in the New Hope PA/Lambertville Nj area. and for the wild life too.

I read the book. I was not impressed. It seemed to glorify the drug hazed life style. I did not appreciate it (this was a book club selection).
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Anonymous

Posted February 21, 2012

Great read!

I can't wait to eat at Prune in NYC!

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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DDL33

Posted February 4, 2012

Loved this book!

First, Ms. Hamilton's writing is beautiful. She did an amazing job of describing her very intersting life. (She was pretty funny too!) And the discussion and description of food was perfect - not too much, just enough.

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted December 11, 2011

Good, quick read and well-written

I liked this book. Very descriptive. A quick and entertaining read. She's a talented writer. I did not like that the book just ended all of a sudden with unresolved issues the writer had been building to a climax. That is the big drawback. It needs another chapter, maybe even less than that, to tie up the loose ends that were left dangling.
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PhotographerReader_Julie

Posted October 10, 2011

more from this reviewer

For foodies, and people who like to read about typical life thoughts

I thought this was a very relaxing read. Easy-going and a story of a pretty strange life, but I loved how much her thoughts prevailed and how it all led to a passion for food and cooking and living life.
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Anonymous

Posted October 5, 2011

Loved Every Page I read!

This book was an interesting mix of food,family,stamina,courage and emancipation...It didn't delve too deep into the psych of the family which would have changed the face of the book. It teased you with sadness the writer must have felt but doesn't drone on about it. I enjoyed the down and dirty with the bare essentials of food....You could taste the food she described..actually salivate and I think it made me rethink my usual menu trying to get all the sauces, heavy ingredients and almost toss them out. I have been using her basic ingredients making meals with a smile on my face...Wondering if she (the writer)would be proud. I have re-read it several times and I continue to enjoy it on my color "NOOK".

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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sterling2121

Posted September 14, 2011

Intriguing story!

Interesting book on the what goes into making a great chef.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Lottielu

Posted August 12, 2011

Stellar!!!

As a chef with a diverse background and 26 years in the industry, I was immediately hypnotized by Ms. Hamilton's life experiences. I could not put this book down and was amazed by the similarities of my own journey..

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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scorpiogirl

Posted August 11, 2011

Read it!

Great story, I didn't want it to end. It's amazing how society and all of us has changed in only one generation! Gabrielle is resilliant beyond belief.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Meshugenah

Posted June 27, 2011

Wonderful Memoir of Food

This is a memoir, not an autobiography. Its focus is on one woman's growth, her understanding of herself, and her connections to others through the lens of food - memories of food and the making of food.

I have no way of knowing if Gabrielle Hamilton's restaurant is good or great. What I know from this book is that her passion for food guides her and sometimes misguides her, and she shares that passion in a palpable way. I can taste her memories.

If you are disconcerted by only passing mention of fractured relationships, you may not like this, since Ms. Hamilton does not dwell on that which happened outside of this food perspective. If she lost contact with someone for a reason irrelevant to this perspective, she does not dwell on it.

0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Fester

Posted May 25, 2011

Interesting Read

This is a very readable biography, as Hamilton is a good writer. Her story is interesting. My only complaint is that she spends too much time expressing her bitterness about her parents' divorce, for which she blamed her mother, without fully explaining why she is so bitter or why her mother initiated the divorce. The book is best when it focuses on Hamilton's love of food and the use of food as an expression of love and human interaction.
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Meh.

Overall an interesting story with some nice foodie tidbits, but lacking the depth I was hoping for.

Not my favorite

self serving book with nothing to learn about cooking

Highly recommended-such an honest, from the gut, read!

It seems fitting that a book that is different from most should

More Memoir then Chef's Memoir

Interesting but not a great read.

Recommended for cooks of passion

A walk down memory lane for locals in the New Hope PA/Lambertville Nj area. and for the wild life too.

Great read!

Loved this book!

Good, quick read and well-written

For foodies, and people who like to read about typical life thoughts

Loved Every Page I read!

Intriguing story!

Stellar!!!

Read it!

Wonderful Memoir of Food

Interesting Read