Blood, bones, & butter The inadvertent education of a reluctant chef

Gabrielle Hamilton

Book - 2011

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BIOGRAPHY/Hamilton, Gabrielle
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Published
New York : Random House [2011]
Language
English
Main Author
Gabrielle Hamilton (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
291 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781400068722
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

IT'S hard to think of another American chef who has outdone Gabrielle Hamilton in converting the humblest of stages into the heftiest of reputations. The restaurant she opened in downtown Manhattan in 1999, Prune, has barely enough room for the 30 diners it squeezes in at brunch, lunch and dinner, and despite the reliable presence of dozens of additional customers waiting on the sidewalk, she has either escaped or resisted the itch for expansion that so many of her contemporaries scratch and scratch. Prune has no annex or uptown sibling; there is no Prune Dubai. Just this one cramped, irresistible nook with its scuffed floors, nicked tables and servers in pink. And yet Hamilton's renown among, and even beyond, the food cognoscenti is huge. That's principally because what she has championed at Prune - hearty comfort food prepared to a gourmet's standards and served in a manner so unceremonious that the utensils don't always match - foreshadowed some of the most prominent dining trends of the day. It owes something as well to her success as a woman in a field still dominated by men. But there's another explanation: Hamilton can write. For many years now, she has popped up in prominent publications as the author of eloquent, spirited glimpses into the heart, mind and sweaty labor of a chef. So the growing ranks of the restaurant-obsessed have been able to feast not only on her deviled eggs but also on her prose. After much anticipation, the inevitable memoir has arrived. "Blood, Bones and Butter" traces nearly all of Hamilton's life and career, from an unmoored childhood through her triumph at Prune, which didn't end the search for a sense of place and peace that is the overarching theme of this autobiography, as of so many others. It's a story of hungers specific and vague, conquered and unappeasable, and what it lacks in urgency (and even, on occasion, forthrightness) it makes up for in the shimmer of Hamilton's best writing. Recalling her mother's penchant for heavy eyeliner, she flashes back to "the smell of the sulfur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil." Hamilton invokes the "voluptuous blanket of summer night humidity," captures the tantalizing promise of delicate ravioli by observing that "you could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain," and compares breast feeding to being cannibalized, "not in huge monstergore chunks, but like a legion of soft, benign caterpillars makes lace of a leaf." There are rhapsodic passages aplenty about eating and cooking, and while such reveries can easily seem forced or trite, hers ring sweetly true. She's recounting actual rapture, not contriving its facsimile on cue. You can feel her amazement as her father roasts whole lambs on a spit and her awe at the dexterity with which the chef André Soltner pulls off a perfect omelet, using only a fork. Readers with limited appetites for food porn, beware. This is one salacious expedition into the folds of orecchiette and fine points of puntarelle. Hamilton's obvious belief that all the world can be refracted through its edible components is so complete that it leads, in a few instances, to sentences that almost come across as satires of food writing. "I had no clue that my parents were unhappy with each other until I was sweeping up cornichons and hard salami and radishes off the kitchen floor" is the opening line of a chapter chronicling her parents' breakup. Her family is coming apart, and still she's taking inventory of their larder. That happens early in the book, following an account of growing up in a bucolic part of Pennsylvania along the Delaware River, and it flags the onset of drift and delinquency. During Hamilton's teenage years, her parents are often gone or distracted, and at times she's left to fend for herself. She lies about her age to get dishwashing work. She steals. And by age 16, she's made her way to Manhattan, an early graduate from an alternative high school doing battle with the platoons of cockroaches in a Hell's Kitchen apartment she shares with her older sister. She winds up waiting tables, and that, along with the dishwashing, establishes the book's main leitmotif: time and again she is drawn - pulled, really - back to the world of food and hospitality. It happens even when she struggles against it, a battle suggested by the book's subtitle, "The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef." Economic necessity is the proximal reason, but not the real one. Through feeding people Hamilton exerts control over a life rendered chaotic and undependable when her parents split; she takes care of others in the way her parents didn't take care of her. This is clearest in her description of opening Prune, which illuminates how much more than menu planning goes into the creation of a restaurant. Hamilton is guided by nostalgia and yearning, and wants above all to forge an emotional connection with her guests. She's funny about the pretensions of other restaurants, proclaiming that Prune would "never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin." And she's blunt about the moment-to-moment drudgery of running the place. While Anthony Bourdain's memoir "Kitchen Confidential" only purported to deglamorize restaurant work, then went on to give it a naughty, swashbuckling romanticism, Hamilton takes you out back behind Prune, where, all alone, she discovers and disposes of a rat swollen with maggots. No sane reader will aspire to this. She is blunt as well about how tedious she finds discussions of gender in the workplace, how insufferable she considers the self-satisfied milieu at the farmers' market and how surreal, ludicrous and, yes, exhilarating she deems the celebrity-chef treatment. But that candor draws attention to its absence on other fronts. For many years she is coupled and, according to a throwaway phrase, madly in love with a woman she meets while in Michigan to do graduate work in creative writing, but she says little else about the relationship, and doesn't wrestle in a satisfying way with the questions raised by her affair with, then marriage to, a man. He and she live apart even after the birth of their two children, and this arrangement is initially addressed with a frustrating casualness. Even Later, when she examines the marriage further, it remains opaque, though his Italian lineage and their sojourns in Apulia give her the material for the last, too leisurely quarter of the book. Hamilton may, justifiably, not want her focus to swerve from the kitchen to the bedroom, but she winds up seeming selectively guarded and evasive, and maybe a bit careless. In many places the book cries out for connective tissue that's missing, and there are specific omissions that throw a reader off balance. Although elated by her entry into that graduate program, Hamilton doesn't say what she writes there - even as she's being caustically dismissive of her classmates' efforts. And when her mother reappears in the book after a long absence, Hamilton vents a fury at her that she hasn't set the stage for. A more general anger and even disdain for other people's vanities and inconsistencies flicker throughout the book. They undercut her likability as a narrator, though she's redeemed time and again by her self-reliance, her industriousness and her observant, clever storytelling. She notes that less than a week after tackling the maggoty rat, she was on her way in a black town car to Martha Stewart's television show for a cooking demonstration. And she returns toward the end of the book to those ravioli, revealing only then that what lay inside was terrible. Her timing is perfect, her metaphor clear and her point indisputable. Sometimes pasta and people don't make good on all the hope you have invested in them. This is one salacious expedition into the folds of orecchiette and the fine points of puntarelle. Frank Bruni, a former restaurant critic for The Times, is the author of "Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 13, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review

The book's subtitle should arouse interest. How was the author's education inadvertent? What is the reason she was reluctant to become a chef? All will become clear upon completion of the final page of this lusty, rollicking, engaging-from-page-one memoir of the chef-owner of Prune restaurant in New York's East Village. Hamilton opened her eating establishment without any prior experience in cheffing, but the life experiences she did have before that bold move, told here in honest detail, obviously made up for any deficiencies in heading up a restaurant and also provide material for an electric story that is interesting even if the author hadn't become the chef-owner of a successful restaurant. An idyllic childhood turned sour when her parents divorced; her adolescence and young womanhood encompassed drugs, menial jobs, and lack of direction and initiative when it came to continued education. All's well that ends well, however, and her story does indeed do that. Add this to the shelf of chef memoirs but also recommend it to readers with a penchant for forthright, well-written memoirs in general.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Hamilton, chef and owner of the New York City restaurant Prune, lays bare her life in this aptly titled memoir. The foodie appeal is undeniable, but what really entrances the listener is Hamilton's unflinching disclosure of her personal struggles (e.g., drug abuse, grand larceny, a loveless marriage) as well as the celebration of her professional successes (e.g., establishing and nurturing her cherished restaurant). With Hamilton herself reading, the story takes on an added level of significance as she personally invites listeners into multiple aspects of her life. Hamilton's rise from menial restaurant worker to star chef via hard work and drive will inspire many in the field, even while stripping away their illusions of the glamour of this calling. Recommended for fans of Anthony Bourdain and the grittier stories of kitchen life. ["The scenes of ‰Italian Italian' family life and leisure are charming, and the warm presence and influence of the matriarch, her mother-in-law, is delightful," read the review of the New York Times and LJ best-selling Random hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 1/27/11.-Ed.]-Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

In this provocative debut, a renowned chef finds her fulfillment as a writer.Though a passion for food provides Hamilton's theme and focus, her passion for writing distinguishes this memoir from similar behind-the-kitchen volumes. In fact, her accomplishment as the owner and chef of Prune, in New York City, seems less like destiny than the result of a series of detours, from the broken family that left her to support herself with a series of food jobs since her early teens, when petty crime and casual drugs also marked her life, through her on-again/off-again college studies that culminated in an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan. "I was not looking to open a restaurant," she writes of the quixotic leap she made into the professiondespite never having worked as a chef, written a business plan or had any idea of the legal processes involved in converting an abandoned space into a tiny bistro that would quickly come to gross almost $2 million a year. While the centerpiece of the book is an amazing chapter that finds the foundation of Pruneits spirit of hospitalityin her experiences as an impoverished international vagabond, the restaurant provides only one dimension of the narrative's richness. In a manner that is never glib or sentimental, Hamilton proceeds from the childhood innocence of her family's unraveling through the life of a precocious hustler for whom introspection was a luxury through the romantic complications of leaving her longtime female lover for the Italian man she would marry. This union that would provide her with something like the family she had lost decades earlier, but a marriage that would prove both turbulent and unconventional (the couple had two children in their first seven years of marriage without living together).After initially disdaining a career in food as one devoid of "meaning and purpose," she finds both here.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 We threw a party. The same party, every year, when I was a kid. It was a spring lamb roast, and we roasted four or five whole little guys who each weighed only about forty pounds over an open fire and invited more than a hundred people. Our house was in a rural part of Pennsylvania and was not really a house at all but a wild castle built into the burnt-out ruins of a nineteenth-century silk mill, and our backyard was not a regular yard but a meandering meadow, with a creek running through it and wild geese living in it and a Death Slide cable that ran from high on an oak to the bank of the stream and deposited you, shrieking, into the shallow water. Our town shared a border so closely with New Jersey that we could and did walk back and forth between the two states several times in a day by crossing the Delaware River. On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie's in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams's Mobil on the New Hope side. In the afternoons after school on the Pennsylvania side, I walked over to the Jersey side and got guitar lessons at Les Parson's guitar shop. That part of the world, heavily touristed as it was, was an important location of many events in the American Revolutionary War. George Washington crossed the Delaware here, to victory at the Battle of Trenton, trudging through the snowy woods and surprising the British in spite of some of his troops missing proper shoes, their feet instead wrapped in newspaper and burlap. But now my hometown has become, mostly, a sprawl of developments and subdivisions, gated communities of small mansions that look somewhat like movie sets that will be taken down at the end of the shoot. Each housing development has a "country" name-Squirrel Valley, Pine Ridge, Eagle Crossing, Deer Path-which has an unkind way of invoking and recalling the very things demolished when building them. There is now a McDonalds and a Kmart- but when I was growing up, you had to ride your bike about a mile down a very dark country road thick with night insects stinging your face to even find a plugged-in Coke machine where you could buy a vended soda for thirty-five cents. Outside Cal's Collision Repair in the middle of the night that machine glowed like something almost religious. You can now buy a Coke twenty-four hours a day at half a dozen places. But when I was young, where I lived was mostly farmland, rolling fields, rushing creeks when it rained, thick woods, and hundred-year- old stone barns. It was a beautiful, rough, but lush setting for the backyard party my parents threw with jug wine and spit-roasted lambs and glow-in-the-dark Frisbees. The creek dividing the meadow meandered and, at its deepest bend, was lined with small weeping willows that grew as we grew and bent their long, willowy, tearful branches down over the water. We would braid a bunch of the branches together to make a Tarzan kind of vine rope that we could swing on, out over the stream in our laceless sneakers and bathing suits, and land in the creek. That is where we chilled all of the wines and beers and sodas for the party. We were five kids in my family, and I am the youngest. We ran in a pack-to school, home from school, and after dinner at dusk-like wild dogs. If the Mellman kids were allowed out and the Bentley boys, the Drevers, and the Shanks across the street as well, our pack numbered fifteen. We spent all of our time out of doors in mud suits, snowsuits, or bare feet, depending on the weather. Even in "nature," running around in the benign woods and hedges and streams, diving in and out of tall grasses and brambles, playing a nighttime game that involved dodging the oncoming headlights of an approaching occasional car, bombing the red shale rocks down into the stream from the narrow bridge near our driveway to watch them shatter-we found rough and not innocent pastimes. We trespassed, drag raced, smoked, burgled, and vandalized. We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning. My parents seemed incredibly special and outrageously handsome to me then. I could not have boasted of them more or said my name, first and last together, more proudly, to show how it directly linked me to them. I loved that our mother was French and that she had given me that heritage in my very name. I loved telling people that she had been a ballet dancer at the Met in New York City when she married my father. I loved being able to spell her long French name, M-A-D-E-L-E- I-N-E, which had exactly as many letters in it as my own. My mother wore the sexy black cat-eye eyeliner of the era, like Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren, and I remember the smell of the sulphur every morning as she lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil. She pinned her dark hair back into a tight, neat twist every morning and then spent the day in a good skirt, high heels, and an apron that I have never seen her without in forty years. She lived in our kitchen, ruled the house with an oily wooden spoon in her hand, and forced us all to eat dark, briny, wrinkled olives, small birds we would have liked as pets, and cheeses that looked like they might well bear Legionnaire's Disease. Her kitchen, over thirty years ago, long before it was common, had a two-bin stainless steel restaurant sink and a six-burner Garland stove. Her burnt orange Le Creuset pots and casseroles, scuffed and blackened, were constantly at work on the back three burners cooking things with tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones-whatever was budgeted from our dad's sporadic and mercurial artist's income-that she was stewing and braising and simmering to feed our family of seven. Our kitchen table was a big round piece of butcher block where we both ate and prepared casual meals. My mother knew how to get everything comestible from a shin or neck of some animal; how to use a knife, how to cure a cast-iron pan. She taught us to articulate the "s" in salade nicoise and the soup vichyssoise, so that we wouldn't sound like other Americans who didn't know that the vowel "e" after the consonant "s" in French means that you say the "s" out loud. And yet I remember the lamb roast as my father's party. I recall it was really his gig. With an art degree from Rhode Island School of Design on his office wall, two union cards-stagehands and scenic artists-in his wallet, five able-bodied children, a French wife, and a photograph torn from a magazine of two Yugoslav guys roasting a lamb over a pit, he created a legendary party-a feast that almost two hundred people came to every year from as far away as the townhouses of New York City and as near as our local elementary school. My dad could not cook at all. He was then a set designer for theatrical and trade shows and he had a "design and build" studio in Lambertville-the town where he himself had grown up, the town where his own father had been the local country doctor. We kids were forever running into people who'd say, "Your granddaddy delivered all three of my sons!" Or, "Your granddaddy drove a Cadillac! One of the very few cars at the time in Lambertville!" After growing up in that small rural town, my dad, the youngest son, went away to college and then to art school. He came back with a mustache, a green Mustang, and a charcoal gray suit and installed himself there, in his hometown. In 1964, he bought the old skating rink at the dead end of South Union Street with its enormous domed ceiling and colossal wooden floor. In that building he started his studio, an open work space where scenery as big as the prow of a ship could be built, erected, painted, and then broken down and shipped off to the city for load-in. Every year when he got the job to build the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus there, we would go after school and zip around on the dollies, crashing into the legs of the chain-smoking union carpenters and scenic artists who were busy with band saws and canvas and paint. We would run up and down mountains of rolled black and blue velour, laid out like in a carpet store, and dip our hands into oil drums full of glitter. Prying back the lid on a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter-the kind of barrel that took two men and a hand truck to wheel into the paint supply room of the shop-and then shoving your hands down into it up to your elbows is an experience that will secure the idea in your heart for the rest of your life that your dad is, himself, the greatest show on earth. We made our Halloween costumes out of lighting gels, backstage black velour curtaining, scrim, and Mylar. When we went with our father to see the actual circus at Madison Square Garden, we spent almost the whole show backstage where we met Mishu: The Smallest Man in the World, and petted the long velvety truncks of the elephants in jeweled headdresses. We met Gunther, the lion tamer, and marveled at his blond blond hair and his deep deep tan and, giggling like the children we were, his amazing ass-high and round and firm, like two Easter hams-in electric blue tights. I associate my dad almost exclusively with that lamb roast because he could dream it up and create the scenery of it. My dad has an eye for things. He can look at the stone rubble covered in scaffolding that is the Acropolis, for example, and without effort, complete the picture in its entirety, right down to what people are wearing, doing, and saying. In his mind's eye, out of one crumbling Doric column, he can visualize the entire city, its denizens and smells, the assembly's agenda and the potted shrubs. Where the rest of us saw only the empty overgrown meadow behind our house, riddled with gopher holes, with a shallow, muddy stream running through it and a splintering wooden wagon that I had almost outgrown, he saw his friends: artists and teachers and butchers, scenic painters and Russian lighting designers, ship captains and hardware merchants all with a glass in hand, their laughter rising high above our heads and then evaporating into the canopy of maple leaves; the weeping willows shedding their leaf tears down the banks of the stream; fireflies and bagpipers arriving through the low clinging humidity of summer; a giant pit with four spring lambs roasting over apple-wood coals; the smell of wood smoke hanging in the moist summer nighttime air. I mean it. He sees it all romantic like that. He says, about all of his work, "Everybody else does the bones and makes sure the thing doesn't fall down. I do the romance." It must have been my mother, the cook, who was in the kitchen with the six burners and the two-bin sink making the lima bean salad and the asparagus vinaigrette and the all-butter shortcakes, counting out the stacks of paper plates with the help of my older sister-the two of them doing "the bones" as my father called it. But it was from him- with his cool, long sideburns and aviator sunglasses, his packet of unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist's paycheck)-from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties. There was a Russian Winter Ball, I remember, for which my dad got refrigerator-sized cartons of artificial snow shipped in from Texas and a dry ice machine to fog up the rooms and make the setting feel like a scene from Dr. Zhivago. And there was a Valentine's Day Lovers' Dinner, at which my father had hundreds of choux paste éclair swans with little pastry wings and necks and slivered almond beaks that, when toasted, became their signature black. He set them out swimming in pairs on a Plexiglas mirror "pond" the size of a king's matrimonial bed with confectioner's sugar snow drifts on the banks. "Swans," he pointed out, "mate for life." For a kind of Moroccan-themed party that my parents threw, my dad built low couches from sheets of plywood and covered them with huge fur blankets and orange velour brought home from the studio. By the time the candles were lit and the electric lights extinguished, the whole house looked like a place where the estimable harem of a great pasha might assemble to offer their man pomegranates, pistachios, and maybe more carnal treasures. There were tapestries and kilims stacked as tall as me, where adults stoned on spiced wine and pigeon pies could lounge. By the time that party really got rolling, I remember walking from room to dimly lit room feeling acutely the ethos of the era-the early 1970s-as if it, too, were sprawled out on the "scene shop" couch wearing long hair and a macramé dress, barely noticing how late it was and that I was still up. But the lamb roast was not a heavily themed and elaborately staged one- off. It was, as parties in our family went, a simple party, thrown every year, produced with just a fire and a sheet of plywood set over sawhorses for the carving of the lambs. We built a fire in our shallow pit, about eight feet long and six feet wide. It's possible that my dad dug it alone, but if there was an available sixteen-year-old around, like his son, my oldest brother Jeffrey, it's very likely that they dug it together. At each end of the pit they set up a short wall of cinder blocks with a heavy wooden plank on top, looking like the head and baseboards of a giant bed, where the long wooden poles onto which the baby lambs had been lashed would rest. The baby lambs, with their little crooked sets of teeth and milky eyes, were slaughtered and dressed up at Maresca's Butchers, then tied onto ten-foot poles made of ash because the branches of an ash tree grow so straight that you can skewer a baby lamb with them easily. Jeffrey had a driver's license and a 1957 Chevy truck with a wooden bed and a big blue mushroom painted on its heavily Bondoed cab. It had big dangling side-view mirrors and torn upholstery over which we threw a mover's blanket, but it ran. So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black's Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. I rode in the bed of the truck, in a cotton dress and boy's shoes with no socks, hanging on as tight as I could to the railings and letting the wind blast my face so hard that I could barely keep my eyes open. Even with my eyes closed, I could tell by the wind and the little patches of bracing coolness and the sudden bright sunshine and the smell of manure when we were passing a hay field, a long thick stand of trees, a stretch of clover, or a horse farm. We passed brand-new deer emerging from the woods and standing in herds of forty in the wide open cornfields. Finally we got to Johnson's Apple Orchard where we picked up our wood for the fire. Excerpted from Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.