Audio Book Review: Blood, Bones and Butter

'Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef'
Author: Gabrielle Hamilton


Format: Audio CD
Published: Random House Audio; March 2011
Narrator: Gabrielle Hamilton
Genre: Memoir
Rating: B
Source: Personal copy


Synopsis: 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.


My Take: If I could just read books about food, I would probably be perfectly content. Especially if they involve a little travel. I don't know what it is but food memoirs make me so happy. Maybe it's because all books make my imagination work to imagine characters and places, but food books make you imagine smells and tastes too so it gets so many more senses involved in the reading that you are just overwhelmed and 'into' the book. 


I admit that I was drawn into this book because it looked a little, well, bad-ass, so I thought it might be a little different from your average food memoir. And it was. The book was divided into three sections: blood, bones, and butter. I think the first two, for me, were the most interesting.


Blood is about Hamilton's early life. Her childhood at first is fascinating and charming. She is growing up on the East Coast in the 60s as one of many children. Her mother is French and instills in her, perhaps reluctantly, a respect for food at an early age. While other children were bringing meatloaf sandwiches and cookies to school, the Hamilton family was bringing stinky cheese, bruised pears and other fancy French food that no one knew of. It made me giggle because I think everyone feels like their lunch is unlike everyone else's in school. Mine was always 'healthy', full of whole-wheat sandwiches and apples, while the other kids got Lunchables. In her early teens her parents get a divorce and she, being the youngest, is left to fend for herself. So begins a fascinating life of some crime and working in restaurants from a ridiculously early age.

Bones seems to relate to the struggle of making money as a catering chef in the 80s, going back to school, and starting up her own, now incredibly successfully restaurant in the late 90s, Prune. I always find these details fascinating. It seems so difficult to run a restaurant. Hard hours, tough to get good staff and a will to survive unlike any other. However, next time I am New York, I want to eat at Prune!

Butter is more about family because Hamilton does find the time to get married and have children, however unconventionally (and it is very unconventional!). This at first was fascinating to me and then it became very disheartening. If I am being vague it's because, while you can probably find it all out on Wikipedia as it is a memoir and someone's life, a book is probably best served undiscovered.

As a food memoir, it's not the best I've ever read, but it certainly is good and one I would recommend.

Cover Lust: Like I said above, this cover drew me right in! It's unlike anything I've seen before for a food memoir and I absolutely love it!