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w w w. d r d e x t e r. c o m
THAT CAN’T BE GOOD.
BY VANESSA SALVIA
Life is sweet, mostly
Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter
a nourishing, satisfying memoir
C
hef and restaurant owner
Gabrielle Hamilton never
intended to be a chef, or a
restaurant owner. That much we get from
the title of her memoir, Blood, Bones &
Butter: The Inadvertent Education of
a Reluctant Chef. She never attended
culinary school — her fi nest education
was as a child watching her French
mother put her collection of burnt orange
LeCreuset cookware to use, feeding
her family of seven with “dark, briny,
wrinkled olives” and small birds the kids
“would have liked as pets.”
But after a lifetime of restaurant
work, starting with the dishwashing job
she lied her way into at age 13, it’s not
surprising that she became proprietor of a
small but immensely popular restaurant,
Prune (her grandmother’s nickname for
her), in New York’s East Village. What is
more surprising is how easily Hamilton
created a book about a life completely
intertwined with food that is really more
about family, and nowhere near as trite
as the typical food memoir.
Hamilton is a nose-to-tail chef, and is
equally raw and revealing with her use of
words. Her metaphors are rich with meaning
and emotion; the book is fi lled with perfect
sips of words that you sometimes just
want to read over and over again, yet her
memoir doesn’t contain recipes and she
doesn’t dwell on overly vivid descriptions
of food. Some of her passages, about her
own mother in particular, are so angry and
painful they’re diffi cult to digest.
Hamilton blossoms from a contented
youngster nestled in the embrace of an
eccentric but tight family into a teenage
hoodlum who “grazed through the menu
of adult behavior.” She married an “Italian
Italian” man who wooed her with fresh
hand-made ravioli, with herbs and ricotta
visible through the thinly rolled dough
“like a woman behind a shower curtain,”
despite the fact that she was already in a
long-term relationship with a woman.
At fi rst, her green-card marriage is
nothing more than “performance art,” yet
after two sons and seven years (and the
chance to cook with her husband’s old-world
mother), she longs for it to be something
more. Though she fi nds that her years as a
chef more than prepare her for the challenges
of motherhood (changing a diaper is just like
trussing a chicken), Hamilton’s happiness
never solidifi es the way she hopes it will —
around each turn of her life, what little glitter
there was continually fades, and Hamilton
seems to stretch herself thinner and thinner,
like that pasta dough, looking for a way to
retrieve the hope and promise she felt as a
child in rural Pennsylvania in the ’70s. She
sometimes seems to purposely trudge down
the hardest road while eagerly giving the
fi nger to anyone in her way, yet there’s a
resiliency within her we come to admire.
Hamilton’s success at Prune, and in her
writing life, was seemingly borne from the
most diffi cult struggles. And yet, what she
created with this book is nourishing and
satisfying. Perhaps that is a living testament
to her artist father, from whom she learned,
long ago, “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.”
ew
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