Blood, Bones & Butter
The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
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4.2 • 17 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. 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; 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 prickly marriage that nonetheless yields lasting dividends. By turns epic and intimate, Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chef and restaurateur Hamilton, chef/owner of the acclaimed New York City restaurant Prune, offers a sensuous and evocative memoir of her rural Pennsylvania childhood and her training as writer and chef. The youngest of five children raised by a glamorous French former ballerina and a theater set designer, Hamilton grew up petted and unsupervised, free to roam with packs of neighborhood children who wore, according to the season, "mud suits or snowsuits." Hamilton's account is studded with precise observations made in felicitous prose that brings her "wild castle" of a home to life, as well as her lost years after her parents' divorce. Unfortunately, Hamilton is a poor reader of her own material. Her voice is monotone and scarcely strains to communicate drama. There's a reserve and coldness that does not melt away, a listlessness at odds with the intelligence and energy of the prose, the warmth of her humor, and her lush descriptions. A Random hardcover.
