“Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
Memoirs I’ve read fall into one of four categories. There’s the “My childhood is worse than your childhood” memoir, the “I am or hang out with famous people” memoir, the chef/restaurateur” memoir, and the “traveled the world and met quaint people” memoir. This book hits all four of these categories, which is probably why it hit the bestseller list as well. It was so perfect that the cynical and suspicious side of me wondered if some of it was fabricated, but in the end, I didn’t care. It’s a good story, and Hamilton’s MFA in creative writing was apparently not wasted money.
The first part, “blood,” talks about Hamilton’s childhood growing up in a large family in an old silk mill on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Her memories center around a party her parents used to throw every year, in which they roasted whole lambs over applewood fires. It’s no secret to me why culinary memoirs are so good they deserve their own category. The descriptions of the sweet woodsmoke, the hiss of the infused oil, the scent of hay as the meadow is mowed, the glowing lanterns hanging from the trees–all these things made me want to rush down to the butcher and cook up some lambs for 40 or 50 of my closest friends.
Hamilton spends a lot of time describing her parents as well. Her father is an artist who makes props for the circus (and that could be one of the top ten coolest jobs I’ve ever heard about). Her mother is a very capable, very French housewife who makes the children eat tiny birds that “they would like to have kept as pets” and wears a cashmere skirt and heels when she goes to gather mushrooms. Alas, as happens so often, her parents engage in a selfish, tempestuous divorce and splinter the family into pieces. Hamilton is forgotten, and basically left to fend for herself at the age of thirteen. Not knowing what else to do, she gets a job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, which leads to prep cook, which leads eventually up the line to chef.
This leads into the second section “bones” where Hamilton talks more about her younger years. She gets into trouble, goes back to school, eventually graduates and she decides she wants to travel around the world. She begs and borrows enough money for a plane ticket, and the next thing we know she’s in France and in Greece, staying with friends of her parents. There’s implication that she worked there too, which I marvel at, as even in the 90s it was almost impossible for an American to get a work visa overseas. This is the travel/quaint life part of the memoir, a sub category I feel is designed to inspire envy in its readers. I’ve read a few books in this category, and I love the hagiographic quality of them. The people in (insert country here) live better, more simply, more beautifully. These books are usually set in southern Europe, or occasionally Japan. They are overly romantic escapist books, and I am fond of reading them, even as I feel jealous of the authors. That said, my favorite part of this book was when Hamilton talked about feeling unhappy in her yearly vacation in Italy. She cracked the veneer of perfection on the “let’s live in a charming southern European village” memoir and brought out that it’s not really all that nice to eat fresh and local all the time if there are only four vegetables available. That it’s great to have a villa, but not if you can’t afford to fix it up and wouldn’t be allowed to anyway, since it’s not yours. It’s lovely to think of belonging to a huge Italian family, but not if you feel like you will never really be part of them.
Hamilton continues from the travel memoir part by including stories of other jobs she had. She works in various kitchens, dates a few women, and then moves back to New York. Next thing you know, she’s opening her own restaurant, despite not having run a restaurant before. In other memoirs, this might be the story about how a woman who takes a failed bistro and wastes a fortune trying to make it work, but Hamilton is made of stronger stuff than the average person.
Hamilton comes across as fierce, ambitious, and so hard working that it sometimes slips into martyrdom. I share some of these traits, but whereas I actually cry when stuff gets too stressful and seek balance in my life, Hamilton is superwoman. She fits in with the Italian women because all of them are accustomed to working from sunup to sundown, and Hamilton doesn’t really ever sound like she expects or wants life to be different for her. Run a full time restaurant, and write a book, and have a baby? Bring it on! It wasn’t until later on, in the “Butter” section, that she started to show some vulnerability, and even then, her vulnerability had nothing to do with lack of energy.
This book raised a lot of questions for me, not just how things happened, but why. Why couldn’t she live with her mother that summer when she was thirteen? Why does a high school dropout with no money feel that matriculating at an expensive private college is a wise thing to do? How long did she travel, and how did she manage to find work overseas without a visa, and where exactly did she go? How did she manage to make Prune into a successful restaurant when so many other experienced restaurateurs fail? Most baffling was why a lesbian would not just marry, but have children with a man she didn’t care for all that much. It’s more a collection of essays than a linear narrative, although it is chronological. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had at least one more book in her.
I recommend this for people who like any of the four categories of memoir I listed in the first paragraph of this review.
