Hamilton spent her idyllic childhood on a wild farm in rural Pennsylvania with an exhilarant father-an artist and set builder-and French mother, both 'incredibly special and outrageously handsome.' As she entered her teens, however, her family unexpectedly dissolved. What sets Hamilton apart, though, is her ability to write with as much grace as vitriol, a distinct tenderness marbling her meaty story. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Īmazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is just what a chef's story should be-delectable, dripping with flavor, tinged with adrenaline and years of too-little sleep. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. There would be no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. the marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. the butter-and-sugar sandwiches we ate after school for snack.

“I wanted the lettuce and eggs at room temperature. By turns epic and intimate, it marks the debut of a tremendous literary talent. Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion.

The smells of spit-roasted lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became as necessary to her as her own skin.īlood, 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 the soulless catering factories that helped pay the rent 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 difficult and prickly marriage that nonetheless yields rich and lasting dividends.īlood, Bones & Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties, often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years, eluded her. Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life.

Blood bones and butter