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Blood, Bones and Butter is the only chef's memoir that holds up as literature, and the reason is that Gabrielle Hamilton is a writer first and a chef second.
The book begins with the lamb. Every spring, her parents dug a pit in the ground outside the converted silk mill where they lived in New Jersey, lit a fire in it and invited hundreds of people for whole-roasted lamb. Her father was a set designer, her mother had been a ballet dancer in France.
Her parents divorced when she was thirteen and she was, in practice, left to fend for herself. She lied about her age to get work in restaurant kitchens, became involved with drugs and theft, worked her way through summer camps and catering kitchens, and spent a decade without direction before taking a writing programme at the University of Michigan.
In 1999 she opened Prune in the East Village. Thirty seats, no business plan and a menu consisting of exactly what she herself wanted to eat.
The final third concerns a peculiar marriage of convenience to an Italian doctor and summers with his mother in Puglia. That section is divisive, and some readers think the book loses its way. Perhaps it does, but it is also the book at its most unsentimental.
The book won a James Beard Award for writing rather than food, which says most of what needs to be said. Anthony Bourdain wrote one of his most effusive blurbs ever about it.
You learn nothing about cooking from this book. What you get is the answer to why anyone would voluntarily work fifteen hours a day in a hot room for poor pay, and anyone who has done it will recognise themselves on every page. Anyone who has not instead gets one of the best-written memoirs about working in a restaurant kitchen, full stop.
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780099498339
Language: English
First published: 2011
