Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: Gabrielle Hamilton's
memoir, Blood, s & 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 . What sets Hamilton apart, though, is
her ability to write with as much grace as vitriol, a distinct
tenderness marbling her meaty story. Hamilton spent her idyllic
childhood on a wild farm in rural Pennsylvania with an exhilarant
her--an artist and set builder--and French mother, both
"incredibly special and outrageously handsome." As she entered
her teens, however, her family unexpectedly dissolved. She moved
to New York City at 16, living off loose change and eating
ketchup packets from McDonald’s; worked 20-hour days at a
soulless catering company; traveled, often half-starved, through
Europe; and cooked for y-riddled children at a summer camp.
The constant thread running through this patchwork tale, which
culminates with the opening of her New York City restaurant,
Prune, is Hamilton's slow simmering passion for cooking and the
comfort it can bring. "To be picked up and fed, often by
strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became
the single most important food experience I came back to over and
over," Hamilton writes, and it's this poignant understanding of
the link between food and kindness that makes Blood, s &
Butter so satisfying to read. --Lynette Mong
Guest Reviewer: Anthony Bourdain on Blood, s, and Butter
Anthony Bourdain is the author of the novels in the
Throat and Gone Bamboo, in addition to the bestseller Kitchen
Confidential and A Cook's Tour. His work has appeared in the New
York Times and The New Yorker, and he is a contributing authority
for Food Arts magazine. He is also the host of the Emmy
Award-winning television show No Reservations. Very quickly after
meeting Gabrielle Hamilton, I understood why she was a terrific
and much-admired chef. I knew that her restaurant, Prune, was
ground-breaking, that she seemed to have come out of nowhere,
instead of being a product of the "system" (she'd emerged from
the invisible subculture of catering), to open one of the most
quirky, totally uncompromising, and quickly-embraced restaurants
in New York City. Her purportedly (but not really) Franco-phobic
menus were intensely, notoriously personal, her early embrace of
the nose-to-tail attitude was way, way ahead the times, and
chefs--all chefs--seemed to like and respect her. Almost as
quickly, it became apparent that this chef could write.
Short pieces appeared here and there over the years and they
were sharp, funny, incisive, unsparing of both author and
subjects--straight to the point and pretense-free, like Hamilton
herself. She could write really well. And she had, from all
accounts, a story to tell. So when it was announced that Blood,
s, and Butter was in the works, I was very excited.
It was a long wait.
Five years later, I finally got my hands on an advance copy and
eagerly devoured it. It was of course brilliant. I expected it
to be. But I wasn't prepared for exactly how goddamn brilliant
the thing was, or how enchanted, difficult, strange, rich,
inspiring and just plain hard her life and career--her long road
to Prune--had been. I was unprepared for page after page of such
sharp, carefully-crafted, ballistically-precise sentences. I was,
frankly, devastated. I put this amazing memoir down and wanted to
crawl under the bed, retroactively withdraw every book, every
page I'd ever written. And burn them.
Blood, s, and Butter is, quite simply, the far-and-away best
chef or food-genre memoir...ever. EVER. It certainly kicked the
hell out of my Kitchen Confidential, which suddenly, in a second,
felt shallow, sopric and ultimately lightweight next to
this...this monster of a book, this--at times--truly hardscrabble
life…Blood, s, and Butter is deeper, better written, more
hardcore, more fully ed-out; a more well-rounded story than
every sunflower-and-saffron account of soft-core food porn in
France. It's as bullshit and pretense-free as AJ Leibling--and at
least as well written, but more poignant, romantic--even
thrilling.
It makes any "as told to" account of famous chef's lives look
instantly ludicrous and bloodless. I've struggled to think of
somebody/anybody who's written a better account of the journey to
chefdom and can't think of anyone who's come even close.
Writing a memoir of one's life as a chef--or even writing about
one's relationship with food--has, with the publication of this
book, become much more difficult. Hamilton has raised the bar
higher than most of us could ever hope to reach. This book will
sell a gazillion copies. It will be a bestseller. It will be an
enduring classic. It will inspire generation after generation of
young cooks, and anyone who really loves food and understands the
context in which it is best enjoyed, NOT as some isolated,
over-valued object of desire, but as only one important aspect of
a larger, richer spectrum of experiences. Each plate of
food--like the menu at Prune--is the end result of a long and
sometimes very difficult struggle.
Read this book and prepare to clean your system of all that's
come before. It's a game-changer and a truly great work by a
great writer and great chef.
- accled chef, Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir, nice first edition hardcover with nice dust jacket.