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The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Random House
March 2011
On Sale: March 1, 2011
304 pages
ISBN: 140006872X
EAN: 9781400068722
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir | Non-Fiction Cooking / Food
a“I wanted the lettuce and eggs at room temperature . . .
the butter-and-sugar sandwiches we ate after school for
snack . . . the marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids
that I grew to crave as an adult. . . . There would be no
‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet,
starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is
actually hungry. In ecstatic farewell to my years of
corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a
martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.”
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. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill
and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in
her adult years, eluded her. 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. The smells of spit-roasted
lamb, apple wood smoke, and rosemary garlic marinade became
as necessary to her as her own skin. 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; 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. Blood, Bones &
Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Gabrielle
Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor,
and passion. By turns epic and intimate, it marks the debut
of a tremendous literary talent.
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