Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef Reviews

• 
  Diane

  On my copy of this book, there was a gushing quote from Anthony Bourdain: "Magnificent. Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever."
  
  I respectfully disagree. I thought Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir was uneven and a bit messy. Some parts were well-written and engaging, and other parts were so tedious that I couldn't wait to be done with the book. Sometimes Gabrielle explains herself well, other times she is maddeningly vague and obtuse. She comes across as both empathetic and also arrogant. Some stories made her sound so cocky and bitter that it was hard to sympathize when her marriage went south.
  
  This memoir covers Gabrielle's childhood; her lessons in cooking from her French mother; her early experiences of working in the food service industry; her time in graduate school; her adventure of opening up Prune, her restaurant in New York's East Village; her love affairs and her marriage to an Italian man.
  
  There are some juicy stories here, there are beautiful descriptions of food, there are some thoughtful passages on finding meaning in life and work and relationships. There were also times when I was so frustrated with the author that I considered abandoning the book.
  
  Now that I am finished, I am glad I read this memoir, but it was not a wholly enjoyable experience. Sort of like a good meal with an obnoxious dinner companion. (I'd still like to visit her restaurant, though.)
• 
  Nina

  I think it went something like this:
  Agent to Gabrielle: "Hey, you've had a famous restaurant for a while now and you've never been on the Food Network, Iron Chef, etc., why not hop on the bandwagon and write a memoir?"
  G. to Agent: "Gee, I've been keeping journals all my life, why not, sure, I'm gonna do it".
  This book pissed me off almost as much as "Eat, Pray, Love". Self-referential (a word she uses a lot), snobby, totally devoid of any spark of humor. This woman doesn't like paragraphs. She just goes on and on and on, and really comes off like a self-absorbed, albeit talented, very full of herself type of woman. Oh, and she's polyamorous, if you can count a green card marriage to a doctor, who she then goes and has two kids with even though they start out living separately. She visits her mother after twenty years only because of the death of her brother, and apparently hates her, even though to me she seems a lot like her mother.
  I don't know why she titled the book ..."reluctant chef"--it's all she ever did, really, except for getting a masters at U. of Michigan ("the Harvard of the midwest) where she trashes all her fellow students, mainly because she's not up to speed with the terminology of literature.
  Aargggh! The only part of the book that remotely touched me was the end, where she realizes her Italian mother in law is aging and may not be around for the annual month in Italy.
  Never does she mention putting love into her food. To her it seems like a battle to get the orders out, and her terrific work ethic, and that she is better than anyone else.
  I have no doubt this will be a best-sold on the NY Times, and maybe it's just me, but I found Ms. Hamilton to be an utterly unappealing, unintersting and even souless person. I'm not saying don't read it, but be warned, this lady is really impressed with herself.
• 
  V. Briceland

  Toward the end of Hamilton's interminable chef memoir, she admits to having a certain sense of Gallic superiority to the rest of the world. Hoo boy, is that an understatement. While Hamilton's recollections of her unconventional childhood and rise to celebrity as the owner of Prune offer up a credible pastiche of MFA-style literary writing, the author's personality is so off-putting that I found the book nearly unreadable.
  
  When Hamilton is talking about cooking, or about the restaurant industry and its quirks, she's very nearly engaging--that is, if one can overlook her arty tendency to switch between first-person-past and second-person-present-tense narrative on the turn of a very thinly-sliced wafer of pancetta.
  
  Hamilton's narrative style rests on the piling-on of rich layers of detail, however, yet throughout long passages of the book I found myself distrusting the accuracy of those details. I raised an eyebrow, for example, when she described driving down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, across 8 Mile Road into downtown Detroit--a nice shout-out to one of Detroit's more infamous landmarks, but a geographically-dubious route into the city. And it's outright disingenuous of her to spout foodie nonsense about how her childhood once-a-week dessert was a single square of really good imported chocolate or a lightly-sweetened slice of buttered bread, when she's mentioned, only a few pages before, gorging on Tastykakes. If one can't trust the details, what, exactly, can one relate to in a memoir like this?
  
  Certainly not the thorn-skinned author, herself. A similar tone of superiority mars a good deal of the narrative. Hamilton dislikes children and their preference for French fries and macaroni and cheese over that single square of really good chocolate, or any of the more exotic fares she serves in Prune; she's dismissive of their parents and indeed, of anyone who will eat less-than-gourmet fare instead of skipping a meal altogether. She spends a large portion of the book secretly mocking and sniggering at her graduate school comrades only to turn around and justify the behavior by accusing them of condescending to her. And the meandering last third of her book turns on the cold fury she experiences, and the subsequent two-week silent treatment she gives to her (long-suffering) husband when he mentions that he'd like to buy a new iPhone.
  
  There really is some minutiae that probably should be left out of a memoir, apparently.
• 
  Cassy

  Whenever I read an autobiography, I find myself asking these two basic questions:
  
  1. Can they write?
  
  2. Is their life interesting enough to warrant a book? Because, I'll be honest, mine is not.
  
  To the first question, Hamilton can write. She earned an MFA (for whatever you think that’s worth). I enjoyed both the crispiness of the details, as well their selection and amount. She was also good at analyzing herself, her life’s trajectory, and the food industry.
  
  Regarding the second question, I had mixed feelings. The primary focus of the book is her varied culinary career. She begins in the kitchen of her French mother and with her jobs waitressing, moves on to the drudgery of catering companies, describes the creation of her own restaurant and its inspirations, and ends cooking with/for in-laws at their Italian villa. The former sections were okay for me. It was the last two stages that I found most interesting – likely because my husband and I enjoy going to restaurants and pretending to be gourmands. (or we did before we had children) As the waiter explains in painstaking detail that the duck is prepared in the [insert method] way and the mushrooms are from [insert exotic locale], we nod and nod as though we understand. It was beneficial to have the perspective of an actual connoisseur. (And husband, the gig is up.)
  
  There was also a good deal about her personal life during which my interest fluctuated more dramatically. I was a straight-laced kid so the tales of her rebellious youth could be titillating. But I did feel that the childhood section was drawn out. Thereafter, I thought she held back. She had a large family growing up, yet only spoke of a few members as an adult. What happened? She has (or had?) an unconventional relationship with her husband. She offhandedly mentioned that they didn’t move in together after their courthouse wedding and were still living apart when she gave birth to their first child. I wanted more of that! I feel invasive asking for such details of a stranger's life (and her family's), but the memoir didn't feel complete without them.
  
  I agree that it was right for the food to be the focus. And I can imagine her publisher enforcing this emphatically. Yet I would have appreciated, at least, better allocation of the personal word count: less childhood and more explanation of monumental adult relationships.
  
  Ultimately, the best way to gauge one’s reaction to this book is probably to ask a third question.
  
  3. Do you want to eat at Hamilton’s restaurant, Prune?
  
  The next time I am in New York, sure, I’d like to go. Although given the success of her book, it might be a royal pain to get a dinner reservation.
• 
  Petra X was coming to terms it was over but then

  This is the second book today I've found that I have read and rated and has disappeared from my shelves. This is freaky. There is a thread on it, I've written to support and got nothing back. Obviously I am not deleting all these books. This is so fucking weird and upsetting. I just don't know what to do.
  
  The other book is
  Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin
• 
  Lauren

  I loved this book. Loved it. At first I thought this was going to be another memoir about "how I fell in love with cooking during my already privileged life". But this one is different. Gabrielle is real. She has had an extraordinarily non-traditional and rough upbringing and is unflinchingly honest about it. So her story is interesting but what I loved most wasn't her unique story but that she is a really, really good writer. Beautiful, I would say. So once I got on board and realized that, I slowed down. I savored this book as I would any delicious meal.
• 
  Richard

  Once a sauce breaks it's almost impossible to bring it back together again. Chefs have their tricks, but even with tricks there's no guarantee, and no guarantee the sauce will hold. Most likely it won't. The unfortunate separation in Blood, Bones & Butter occurs at the half-way mark. Of course, I write this at the risk of being way too clever, and maybe it is, but I'm saddened that Chef Gabrielle Hamilton wasn't able to hold her memoir together.
  
  She had me, totally had me for the first 158 pages of this 291 page book. (Pages are for the review copy.) In those pages a wild child thrives in an eccentric, and artistic/bohemian family, struggles through her parents' failed marriage, sets out on her own and makes just about every mistake a rebel could make, and then begins to find herself in the sensual and spiritual world of kitchen work. Chef Gabrielle has a life-long spiritual affinity with food and service, and tells wonderful, sometimes harrowing stories as she starves her way through Europe, slogs her way through the horrors of tourist trap kitchens, and industrial catering, slugs her way through a creative writing program, and finally finds herself the naive but enthusiastic owner of her own restaurant. I was pretty sure I'd fallen in love with her. Then, at page 159, and upon meeting her husband to be, her education, inadvertent as it may have been, as a chef, reluctant as she may have been, ends.
  
  The second half of the memoir is the story of the first half of a marriage doomed to failure. It's odd, but the story doesn't resolve except in some weird slump of resignation - somehow, maybe she mentions the fact, or alludes to it, I knew the marriage was going to end, but we don't get there, and we're left hanging half way through. The story the Chef decides to tell has its moments, and the best of them are around food and her husband's family, but the stories become repetitive, as do the ever widening cracks in the marriage, and the 130-some pages become an endless series of poor-me's. It's a story of a slow suffocation, not pleasant, beyond a chef's education, and the necessary personal pronouns of memoir get really, really tiresome. Chef Gabrielle even spends the bulk of a chapter telling us what she should have said at a conference at the CIA on women in the restaurant profession. A chapter of second thoughts. That's where she really started to loose me and though I hoped for some writerly/culinary magic that would bring the sauce back together, ultimately I wanted the book to end, and I didn't care how.
  
  What a shame. The education of a chef was interesting, soulful, and moving; the education of a wife and mother wasn't.
• 
  Brittany

  The alternate title for this book:
  I Have an Italian Husband (But I Totally Didn't Mean To) and Other Reasons Why I'm Totally a Legitimate Chef.
  
  At first, Hamilton tries to take the Feminist-Answer-to-Anthony-Bourdain angle: I never wanted to be a chef! I was a bad girl druggie! I was in the kitchen being vulgar and sexual with all the male cooks in my kitchen but I was also educated!
  Unfortunately, Bourdain actually has wit, something that Hamilton is sorely lacking--some of her stories are interesting, but they constantly give the impression that she wants us to think of her as extremely ~deep and meaningful~.
  
  She must have found out this doesn't work, because she switches tactics halfway through the book and becomes that one friend you knew in school if you lived in a small town: she's the one telling you she's related to Princess Di, that she visits London every spring just in time for the roses and the horse races, and oh-my-god if you've never had a REAL mint julep you haven't liiiiived darling.
  
  Her locale of choice is Italy. Partially because of her Accidental Italian Husband (but we don't talk very much and we're not romantic, she assures us), but mostly because it's the perfect backdrop for her to brag about her Totally Rustic and Real Italian Family and how she never buys produce from anyone but the old man on the side of the road because stores are too clueless and farmer's markets are for hipsters...but, she fails to realize that she's a foodie hipster herself, denouncing everything but the Rustic and Authentic and Undiscovered, as if food is some sort of secret only for those who pass some sort of culinary test of wills that apparently involves beheading chickens somehow.
  
  Yeah, we know, Gabrielle, your mother was French, your husband's Italian, and you're in the boys club of chefs even though GODDAMN IT'S SO HARD TO DO WHILE WRANGLING TWO KIDS.
  
  Maybe if you want to feel legitimized as a chef and not a "female" chef, you should take your own advice and focus on what you do rather than your oh-so-unique-womanly-struggles or the fact that you use your family to give yourself permission to cook...it'd probably be a less eye-rolling read, anyway.
• 
  kate

  I suppose "Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef" (which is at least 2 lies) was shorter than
  
  "It's not my fault that everything disappoints me: One narcissist's completely predictable culinary path and résumé of failures with a heaping dose of spin"
  
  or
  
  "Blood, Bones, and Butter: A few mouthwatering meals described in delicious detail served with an amazing amount of whine"
• 
  Jeanette (Ms. Feisty)

  This is not a chef's tale in the fashion we've come to expect from foodie books in recent years. It's more of an autobiography that happens to include a lot of cooking and eating. Put even more precisely, it's an exercise in self-analysis through writing, in which the reader is allowed to tag along.
  
  The book's subtitle is a perfect seven-word description of Gabrielle "Prune" Hamilton's road to chefdom. Her training in the food service industry was as inadvertent as any career path could possibly be. She never had a plan. The simple need to survive took her from teenage criminal with a strong work ethic to minor celebrity with a thriving New York City restaurant.
  
  The dissolution of her family led Gabby to take her first job in the food industry at the age of 13. For the next 20 years, she washed dishes, waited tables, freelanced in the catering world, and even served as a cook for a children's summer camp. She was at loose ends in her life when she was offered a chance at a tiny abandoned restaurant space, and all of her years of experience came together in the successful creation of Prune.
  
  Hamilton knows how to spin a narrative, particularly when she has a juicy anecdote that lends itself to embellishment and hyperbole. And yet, for all her ability to tell a story, there's an obfuscatory quality to her writing that smacks of coyness, whether intentional or not. She throws out a lot of references she doesn't explain, and jumps around in the chronology much as one might do in a private journal of self-discovery rather than a book meant for public consumption.
  
  In the last 100 or so pages, the book slowly devolves into a near-microscopic examination of her marriage to Michele, an "Italian Italian." This was where the book fell apart for me. She seemed to have abandoned her original intentions for the book, and she ends it without resolution or indication of where her life now stands.
  
  Those who have read the book will forgive me for saying I was left feeling like her entire life was just one big "bone"-doggle. Her success as a restaurateur excluded, her years were spent letting life live her rather than living her life.
  
  I really enjoyed doing this as a buddy read with my friend Judy, even if she did leave me in the dust. Her questions and comments made me read more carefully, and we had some good laughs along the way.
• 
  Mary

  This is my second read.
  I still give it five stars. Some of her prose really are striking - along with the ones I listed in my first review these additional ones put me right ‘there’ and I had to read a few times before moving on. i.e. pg 145 working the line on a beyond busy shift
  Pg 22 sitting in her mothers lap after dinner
  And this one describing a tile mural at the local butcher shop:
  
  “…On the long white tile wall behind the cases, where the Marescas did their actual bloody work, was a giant mural in friendly colors, depicting a roly-poly, mustachioed butcher in a clean white apron, frolicking in a round, green curlicue fenced-in pasture, with cottony white sheep with little soft pink ears and porky, bristle-less pink piggies, smiling while sniffing the yellow buttercups. The sky overhead was robin’s egg blue, the few clouds were pure white, and the birds and the butterflies went about their song-filled business even though the butcher was wielding a giant cleaver in one hand, headed for one of them.”
  
  Since it’s been 11 years I also googled her to see what she’s been up to. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though her restaurant, Prune, will be opening back up again after Covid. Our NYC trip was cancelled just prior to Covid and Prune was on our list.
  What I did really enjoy in my online escapade was her interview in 2012 with the Toronto library - YouTube 3 parter. She is my work soulmate! Organized to the enth degree, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, working smart not hard, keeping equipment fixed and enough small wares to operate smoothly etc….
  I adore her!!
  
  
  
  First read March 2011
  
  I read an article of hers in the latest Bon Appetite magazine and immediately purchased this book. I absolutely loved it and noticed myself parceling it out so that it would last longer. Even though the final part of the booked felt like it got off kilter and started to ramble, there were just so many great things I loved, that I had to give it five stars.
  Some of the winning pages included:
  ‘Camping’ in the back yard with her brothers and sister ”…that voluptuous blanket of summer night humidity, the smell of wood smoke, the heavy dew of the tall grass around us, the necessary and anchoring voices, giggles, farts, and squeals of disgust of my older siblings….”
  The three pages describing butchering a single chicken with a dull hatchet while her father looks on disgusted.
  And the part that sealed the deal for me was/is her take on being hospitable:
  “…without wasting a moment on that awkward an tedious conversation that will unhappily precede so many hundreds and hundreds of future restaurant meals in all of our lives – whether to share or not to share and whether or not there are food phobias and dietary restrictions among us – simply ordered food for the table …and so set the standard for me for all time of excellent hospitality: Just take care of everything. ….. I forever want to arrive somewhere hungry and thirsty and tired and be taken care of as Iannis took care of us.”
  
  I really enjoyed so many of her stories and memories and related to several. Many of you may not enjoy this book like I did, but a lot of you in the food service industry, just may!
• 
  Jackie

  I was unprepared for how this memoir spooled out. I was not familiar with Hamilton, or Prune, her restaurant in New York City, and was expecting a dainty kitchen memoir, even a tough one. But the book turned out to the be story of a marriage, and more, the story of a woman exploring her own identity and soul. This soul is deeply wrapped up in the kitchen, and that is how the kitchen enters the story: it's a background character that defines the shape of everything around it. As a passionate cook who grew up in the restaurant business, as well as a former professional baker, I thoroughly identified with Hamilton's kitchen soul-connection and there were numerous passages that made the hairs on the back of my neck tingle with delighted recognition.
  
  Nor was I expecting Hamilton's tough-girl persona. Cracking yet another food-related book, I was ready to read about another 'refined woman chef' in the mold of Alice Waters. But Hamilton immediately sets into how she grew up shabby-chic but poor, with artistic parentage, half of which was a French mother who was an expert practical and stereotypically Galllic taste. Gabrielle and her numerous siblings were half-raised as wolves compared to the average sterile, American suburban child. This makes her someone of whom we both disapprove (rifling during family parties though the coats and handbags of the guests to steal money) and silently egg on (cursing creatively in the restaurant kitchen).
  
  Her mother's mastery of the kitchen seeps into Hamilton from infancy and I do think this describes the experience of most serious cooks - we were exposed to passionate cooking from childhood, usually in the form of some tradition or culture. The restaurant, then the kitchen itself, is the place where Hamilton grows up, becomes an adult, finds her lovers, meets her husband, and lastly, discovers, deepens and diversifies her own passions not just for food, but for literature, writing and connection with others. The core of the book becomes the relationship she develops in Italy with the Italian family - especially the mother - of her "Italian, Italian husband." This connection with her mother-in-law, though they do not speak the same language, becomes the driving creative force of her marriage, which though in itself relatively empty, also the way she is able to re-mother herself after long-estrangement from her own mother, and the way she begins to more deeply understand her own vocation, avocation and her maturing personality.
  
  Ultimately, the best thing about this book for me was its core emphasis on the centrality of commensality. Instead of a quaint kitchen memoir, another romanticized travelogue with recipes for wannabe American expats relaxing in their Tuscan villas, or even a 'ya think ya know life in a kitchen, tough guy?' self-congratulation, this was a celebration of feeding people, eating together, loving and being loved, the way Jesus fed the masses with loaves and fishes. Such things are not just about the kitchen; they make up the core of what it means to be human in the company of others.
• 
  Margaret

  This was an exhausting, schizophrenic read for me and I have very contradictory and conflicting feelings about it. In some ways it was both frustrating and off-putting, and yet I really couldn’t put it down until I’d finished it. On the one hand it’s probably the best food memoir I’ve read since Anthony Bourdain’s
  Kitchen Confidential – and for some of the same reasons - but at the same time I got far more information about the author’s spectacularly dysfunctional personal life than I really wanted to have from this kind of a book. The structure is a nightmare, leaping backwards and forwards in time with no warning and darting disconcertingly sideways whenever Hamilton sees something shiny but superfluous in her memory box, and there are run-on sentences that would make Henry James weep with frustration (not that I‘m in any position to throw stones in that regard); but Hamilton’s use of language is extraordinary, vital and juicy and evocative, and the rushing, headlong pace gives her prose a breathlessly immediate, you-are-there impact that’s irresistibly effective, especially at moments of discovery or epiphany for the author, while the general disarray of the narrative is somehow compellingly reflective of how her mind works in a way that’s entirely legitimate for personal memoir. Hamilton herself emerges as a thorny, difficult personality, tough-minded, profane, narcissistic, and selfish, but she’s so completely forthright about what a f***ed up excuse for a human being she is (no time is wasted on excuses or blame or explanations - “this is what it is,” she seems to be saying, “deal with that!”) that you can’t help liking her for having the balls to take such complete responsibility for herself and her actions, and yet she remains essentially a not very appealing person. I admired her and was engaged by her, without warming to her. I would love to have a meal in her restaurant. I would not love to be in a room with her. Make of this what you will – it may be a big mess, but it’s a big mess that makes for a terrific read and I have no reservations about giving it a big four stars.
  
  
• 
  Happyreader

  Blood, Bones, and Bitter would have been a better title. Her constant subterranean rage exhausted me. Great, she can cook and found a workaholic outlet to hide from all of her unexamined issues. She’s well into her forties and still angry with her mother for God knows what. The big complaint is that her parents divorced and abandoned her for a summer. Yet she was abandoned at her dad’s home and it’s her mom, the source of her love of food and cooking, whom she doesn’t speak with for 20 years. Her dad, except for paying her college bills, essentially vanishes from the story. And the story itself is all over the place with sentences so long that you forget what she’s ranting about. For someone who claims to be overly structured, her writing can be as messy as her Italian in-laws' villa kitchen. Besides her two sons, the one person she claims to love most dearly, her sister Melissa, is the one whom she betrays the most, the
  big reveal that was left to the tabloids rather than this self-billed honest memoir. Beware the toxic lesbian sister who claims devotion and sleeps with your husband.
• 
  Lisa

  An engaging and often brutally honest memoir from a talented yet imperfect chef. Gabrielle Hamilton shares her chaotic and fully lived life with us in three sections. She starts with her eccentric childhood growing up with her four siblings and parents in the rural part of Pennsylvania. She learned the joys and beauty of cooking from her French mother and the power of bringing people together with food from her father (Blood). After moving on from the shenanigans and rebellious behavior brought on by her parents' divorce, Hamilton starts building a more stable life for herself which results in the opening of her restaurant Prune and comes with the joys and struggles of marriage and motherhood (Bones). The last section of the book is dedicated to the summer vacations at her husband's family villa in Puglia, Italy where Hamilton explores her insecurities and emotions related to family, love, and belonging (Butter). But don’t worry, you fellow lovers of Italy out there, there is also a lot of talk of food and cooking, and you'll walk away from this section hungry for olive oil and fresh burrata and daydreaming about sipping negronis on the Italian seaside.
  
  I saw another reviewer said that a better title for this book would have been Blood, Bones & Bitter which made me chuckle. Gabrielle Hamilton has a lot of strong opinions, and she unapologetically shares her sharp criticisms on a wide range of topics, including Michiganders, New York farmer's markets, various restaurants, her neighbors, and a number of unsuspecting passersby. And it seems like she reserves some of her harshest words for those closest to her, like her mother and her husband. Some of the rants are entertaining, but some of them left me cringing at either her arrogance or her lack of empathy.
  
  It's clear that Hamilton is not a perfect person and she has her demons to overcome. But she's also a strong and determined woman, and she is generous and kind in her own way. The writing is a bit messy at times which actually fits nicely with the ups and downs and messiness of Hamilton's life, but overall the book is well written and highly engaging. It also felt like the perfect read for summer with all the mouth-watering descriptions of cooking with seasonal ingredients and anecdotes of luminous outdoor gatherings of friends and family enjoying cocktails and conversation under the stars. I walked away from the book feeling appreciative of Hamilton for sharing her intriguing story and also inspired to start planning my next dinner party.
• 
  Susan

  I kept reading mainly because of the gushing praise of Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain highlighting the cover of this book. Either they didn't actually read the book, or their frame of reference is sadly narrow. Or maybe the publisher sent a lot of wine.
  I had to ask my culinary school graduate friend if all chefs are whiny and crude. A lot, but not all, I am told. Argh, what an annoying story. Made worse, no doubt, by the author's MFA in writing. Apparently this necessitates throwing in the occasional colorful phrase, carefully chosen obscure word, or paragraph of painstaking and flowery detail to make sure you remember that she is a trained writer (and you, most likely, are not).
  She had a rough childhood. Her parents were of little use in raising her, so she went feral, took drugs, stole, etc. Somehow managed, with the help of an attorney hired to keep her out of jail by her brother--who somehow managed to become wildly successful--to get back on track. Doesn't want to be a cook, but just keeps at it, even while working on her master's in writing. Blah, blah, blah.
  Married a guy so he could stay in the country. Had two kids and stayed together several years even though they had no real relationship or intimacy. We assume she divorced him finally, since she says it is coming and the description on the jacket says she lives with her two sons. Whine, whine, whine, he never opens up. I missed the part where she put any effort into it.
  The consistent thread through the whole memoir is how she wants a different life, but she never seems to really try to make a change. It is almost claustrophobic to read it. You want to give her a push. She succeeds, but can't ever express any joy or even satisfaction for more than a moment. It is just depressing.
  I am glad I did not buy this book, but only borrowed it from the Library. If I had paid for it, I would be writing to Batali and insisting he pay me back.
• 
  RandomAnthony

  Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter is as good a book I've read about the intersection between eating, cooking, and what we do with the hours in-between. Even though I'm a huge Anthony Bourdain fan but his work sometimes make me feel like I'm reading through a filter that stylizes the profession into a restaurant version of a movie like Goodfellas. I'm not a foodie. I microwave cheese on tortillas. Blood, Bones, and Butter doesn't engage in culinary industry mythmaking; the book is about how cooking and Hamilton's soul intertwine and how the messy knot of humanity that emerges from the resulting tangle interacts with the rest of the world. Blood, Bones, and Butter is the story of a strong woman who could beat your ass and make you dinner. Both would make you cry.
• 
  Alex Givant

  Most of chef and sous-chef memoirs written by men, this book is one of the exceptions. I like her style of talking about her life, personal issues and what made her to be a chef. This memoir is more on "feelings" side of chef-making vs. men memoirs is more about techniques.
• 
  Kathryn

  Gabrielle Hamilton certainly has led an enviable life. Blood, Bones & Butter is an adventure, and, truthfully, I was disappointed when it ended. But I found that while Hamilton is skilled at invoking the senses, she is less adept at reconciling various parts of her story.The resulting gaps within the narrative make it a disjointed and frustrating read and impair what is otherwise a very good book.
  

  
  Feeling “disaffected” after 20 years in the kitchen, she leaves to pursue an MFA degree. After returning to Manhattan, she opens Prune without any prior experience as a restaurant chef or manager. Up to that point, we hear only about a mishmash of catering jobs and a couple of summers as a children’s camp cook. Considering that unorthodox employment record (and her ambiguous feelings toward the industry), the decision to take on her own restaurant is puzzling. Filling in her storytelling would enable readers to make sense of it. Somewhere in there, she could have talked more about her transformation from hustling cocktail waitress to accomplished professional chef. Who (besides her mother) or what has influenced her, and how did she master her craft? What does she feel is most rewarding about a culinary career, and why, specifically, does she become disenchanted with hers? How does she feel she can succeed in the competitive New York restaurant scene?
  

  
  Similar omissions appear in the telling of her personal life. Although I can understand her anger and sense of abandonment at her family’s breakup, I cannot comprehend why those feelings are directed entirely at her mother. I sense that she doesn’t either, because she never addresses it. Hamilton seems unwilling or unable to self-analyze. Equally as confusing is her sudden change from gay to heterosexual woman. No explanation given. She is either as baffled by it herself or simply disinclined to connect the dots for her readers.
  

  
  Overall, it is an enjoyable book, but somehow unsatisfying. The holes are too large. Yes, Hamilton can choose how much to reveal in her memoir. Like another poster suggested, however, she could better support those parts she does reveal.
  
• 
  Amy

  I'm torn. On the one hand, I found myself engaged while reading, and at one point it had me dying for a sandwich from an Italian deli. On the other hand, the author is intensely unlikeable, and her memoir had some really glaring holes in it.
  
  I get that this wasn't necessarily about her romantic life, but I want to know how the following happened: "I mostly like women, which is why my marriage to a man who needed a green card was safe except that I really wanted him to love me. Then we had two kids on purpose, then moved in together." Maybe the author herself doesn't know. Fair enough, but at least say so. The few explanations she does give for her behavior usually seem tacked-on. I found few actual clues to her motivations in the accounts leading up to her revelations of them.
  
  There are the obligatory-for-memoirs neglectful upbringing and drug experimentation. There's the part where she lived in NYC when it was, like, real, and when she went to farms before everything became, like, artisanal, and when she hung out on her building stoop with hookers and ate egg sandwiches that she paid for with pocket change, because she was just so real. Like New York was, back then.
  
  The worst, though, the absolute pits? "Hehehe, I was just wandering around the East Village and someone sort of gave me a restaurant and even though I knew nothing about running a restaurant and it is, like, IMPOSSIBLE to keep a restaurant open even when you know what you're doing, two pages later I am serving insane brunch rushes with nary a word of explanation as to how this happened when I just repeated 400 times that I had no idea what I was doing." So, what, her inner awesomeness plus an ability to go for long periods without eating just won out? We're left to assume as much. I get that the book wasn't really about her restaurant either, but that was the point where the whole thing just got unredeemable for me.
  
• 
  Julie

  Three and a half stars. I can't quite get to a four.
  
  My food epiphany occurred in France (of course), with food prepared by—wait for it—an Italian (of course). It was a three a.m., post-nightclub gathering of bleary-eyed, eardrum-collapsed international students, crammed into Bruno’s and Filippo’s kitchen in the Alpine city of Chambéry, where I had chosen to study because of its proximity to Italy (of course).
  
  I was already half in love with Bruno from Ancona, but when he handed me a bowl of pasta glistening with sea salt and oil and tossed with tuna, capers, tomatoes, and Parmigiano Reggiano, its hangover-killing goodness transported me to a new sort of bliss. It took all of 20 minutes to prepare—most of that was waiting for the water to boil. Simple. And I’d never tasted anything as delicious.
  
  A second light flashed fifteen years later, during culinary school in New Zealand. Pulling several kitchen shifts as part of my course, I realized the chef’s life was not for me. I hated the heat, the pressure, the clothing. My place was front of house, with the diners. As an introvert who loves a crowd, I adored the two-hour relationship with my tables, the way we could swap life stories over lamb shank and wine and, usually, never see one another again. It was the sharing of delicious food and the way the diners turned themselves over to me—trusting, expectant, curious, and delighted—that I treasured.
  
  So, it was very easy to connect with Gabrielle Hamilton at the most visceral level. The psychology of beautiful food—the way it feeds our souls at least as much as our bodies, I get. It was even a vocation for a spell, from that glorious era in New Zealand where I waited tables and taught Hospitality, to the several years I spent working in Seattle as a wine and beer buyer and steward.
  
  As someone who can’t tell a joke at a dinner table to save her life, but who feels the wonder of words in her soul and astonishment that she can weave them together in powerful ways, I connected with Gabrielle Hamilton as a writer. She made me feel better that my treasured acceptance to an MFA program this fall will go no further than a dream pinned to my bulletin board. Hamilton accepted that her soul needed the pan rather than the pen. Like me, she’s a doer, not a scholar.
  
  This connection to her craft, born of nature and desperation, is the most powerful theme in Blood, Bones, and Butter. Hamilton's family celebrated food and loved to party. From her French mother she learned to cook and to revere the process; from her father she learned the crazy sort of joy that comes from opening your home and feeding the masses with fishes and loaves.
  
  The desperation came when that family split apart, scattering like dandelion spores to the wind. The author entered the back door of the restaurant world, tethering herself to dishwashers and prep sinks as a way to create stability while her adolescence was crumbling beneath her.
  
  And thus a memoir was born—Hamilton uses the broad outline of her résumé to structure her relationship with the world—her family, her marriage, her emotional development. This is less a memoir about the power of food than it is about the power of work, about one woman’s dogged determination to succeed on her own steam. Her industry could have been writing, or the stock market or real estate or teaching. The fact that her profession is cheffing is lucky for those of us who love the things she writes about so evocatively—food, travel, and the grit and grime of the restaurant world.
  
  But I never quite trust her. Memoir is an eel—it’s either going to slip through your hands or shock you (or both, as with Blood, Bones, and Butter). The danger for the contemporary memoirist comes in offering up course after course of one’s life as a collection of tasty facts, then dropping the plates when realty catches up and bites you in the ass.
  
  Around the time of the book’s publication, Hamilton appeared on “The Interview Show” and dismissed foodies as "a population that has kind of misplaced priorities." Granted, “foodies” is a tired moniker, but it’s an odd thing for a chef to give the finger to her most ardent fans. In the same interview, Hamilton declares "I'm barely interested in food....I love food but I don't like to talk about it very long."
  
  Kinda weird. This tone of contrariness and defensiveness echoes in her writing, most notably during her years in Ann Arbor as she pursues her MFA at the University of Michigan and when she takes us down the short but winding road of her personal relationships. I ran often into the brick wall of Hamilton’s ego, erected and fortified against deep insecurities.
  
  I was also perplexed by her marriage. Not the doing of it— she wouldn’t be the first to extend a generous hand to someone at odds with the INS. But she seemed baffled to find that love wasn’t waiting for her on the other side of the aisle. And yet, she stepped out on her long-term girlfriend to have a brief affair with her husband-to-be. And she cuckolded her own sister while writing this memoir. Hamilton’s disappointment felt very disingenuous, given her proclivity for infidelity.
  
  I was also troubled by her mother-as-martyr routine. She chose to have two children, twenty months apart, with a man she was neither living with nor, if she is to be believed, hardly speaking to, all while in the early years of running a restaurant. These were choices. She had options, could have sought help, could have organized her life differently. She did not and I respect that. But her natural prickliness and independence read to me like a whole lotta “I’m such a badass, cooking brunch at thirty-nine weeks” self-back patting. It seems to run counter to her belief that we shouldn’t talk about “great female chefs,” we should talk about “great chefs,” period. A discussion, incidentally, that makes of one of the best chapters in the book.
  
  Hamilton isn’t clear why she remained in a loveless marriage, nor why she drifted so far from her family, so the reader has a shadowy grasp on Gabrielle Hamilton, the woman.
  
  But in all fairness, this is the memoir of a chef. Touching on her two years abroad, on her summers in Italy with her now ex-husband’s family, her epiphany while working with the inscrutable Misty in Michigan, and her hardcore catering experiences, Gabrielle Hamilton—the chef and the writer—is a remarkable force. I’d welcome the chance to eat at Prune and the opportunity to read more of her sparkling, no-holds-barred, angry, irreverent, and sexy writing. But I’d rather read it as fiction, because I think I might choke on her facts.
• 
  Cherie

  I enjoyed the story and the fact that the chef/author was brave enough to narrate her own audiobook too. She was brutally honest and right up front with ALL of it.
• 
  Alexis

  Possibly two and a half or three stars. I felt compelled to read this and was interested, but I was irritated by the author. She struck me as really abrasive and strident and I just didn't really like her.
  
  I was interested in the chapters of her early years, and how she came to be a chef and her interest in writing. Her later chapters made me want to visit Italy. But I kept on wondering if I would like her if I met her in person. She seemed incredibly self-absorbed (although most memoirs make you seem self-absorbed, because it's all about your thoughts and life.)
  
  I did relate to her interest and aptitude for an unconventional life, her desire to travel, her dislike for authority and the musings on the way you can fall into your chosen life path. I wondered if we would get along.
  
  Also, I found her green card marriage to be really weird, and had a hard time wrapping my head around that one. (Apparently they divorced after the book was written)
  
  I'm curious to know what other people think.
• 
  Bonnie G.

  A beautiful and searingly honest memoir about a life very fully lived. Hamilton does not appear to be a particularly nice person, but nice is not the be all and end all. She is certainly not one who looks to build bridges, and while I definitely would not want to be her partner (in love or business) her uncompromising approach to all things makes for a great narrator with a sharp and compelling point of view. And the way she writes about food, and about Italy, is as gorgeous and evocative as any writer I can name. I struggled between a 4 and a 5 star on this one, and erred on the 4 star side because I would have liked a bit more discussion of food, and of Prune, and perhaps a little less discussion of her husband's faults, but overall a very worthy memoir.
• 
  Katie

  Wow. I really can't believe how utterly disappointed I was by this book. I skimmed the last 30 pages or so, I was so completely bored and sick of Hamilton.
  
  Here's the thing, and I admit this freely: I was interested in this book because a year or two ago I read an interview with her from Anthony Bourdain in his collection of writing ("The Nasty Bits"). The Hamilton he fawns over, and that I was interested in, was not really in these pages. One of the quotes from said essay are when she says, "Fuck the French." And while her statement is given a sort of wink and smile by Bourdain, whoever wrote this book doesn't sound like someone who'd give an incredible sound bite like "Fuck the French." Sorry, that was awesome. I'm not saying someone needs to be vulgar to be interesting, or even blunt, but I can't recall one thing she wrote in this, under 10 words, that was as memorable as that.
  
  This Hamilton struck me as, first, so ridiculously verbose it was nauseating. I actually laughed out loud when she was making fun of her fellow masters writing students; the style of this reeks of "writing writing like she thinks good writers write." And I insist that I thought that from the first page. I knew i was in trouble from then. It's a lot of adjectives, adverbs, and long, meandering descriptions of things while saying little of anything at all. I was left utterly confused as to who she was. Maybe she is, too. The whole thing felt like an exercise: "DESCRIBE butter melting. DESCRIBE. DESCRIBE." And that's it. Memoirs, to me, are supposed to involve at least some happenings, and relating those happenings to who you are, hopefully. This struck me as almost a word salad.
  
  Another thing Bourdain stated in the essay (I"m sorry to keep referring to it, but it's a lot of why I was so disappointed by this) was how the mystery of her years abroad are stuff of chef legend. Nobody really knows what she did, and the rumors are rampant and hilarious, because she's such a bad ass. Even the back of the book mentions her time in Greece, Turkey, all over the place. And aside from her redundant discussions of her vacations in Italy with her husband (OMG WHAT IS THIS), we get basically nothing regarding her travels elsewhere. I think maybe it worked out to around 30 pages in a near-300 page book. Huh? It's literally like she goes from dishwasher, to waitress, to catering cook, to opening her own restaurant - which makes sense when written like that, in a way, but there's no insight into her actual education. I'm sorry, but just being a catering chef and cooking what you're told doesn't lead to a four-star, famous restaurant.
  
  So, then, I can hear people saying, "Ah, yes, but it was her mother that taught her everything she knew!" Okay. Awesome. She says that about a thousand times too, in ten times as many words. But not realistic. Plenty of people have plenty of moms who are great cooks, and even may be chefs themselves, but I still came away not understanding exactly how her education worked, no matter how informal. I just felt like the success she achieved (and I'm not even remotely saying she doesn't deserve it; no one claims Prune sucks) wasn't correlated to anything in particular except some vague allusions to happenings she never really gets to the meat of.
  
  I really got into for a bit when she opened the restaurant and then . . . That was it. It was just A Success. How? There are a lot of great little restaurants in NYC; anyone who's lived here more than a couple of years has one. But the chefs there aren't famous; the places aren't overflowing with people constantly. So, how did it happen? Even just a simple, "Word of mouth, so-in-so stopped by, and BOOM!" would've been good. I think her sister working at Saveur had something to do with it, but as I said, her writing style is so vague I had trouble getting what she was trying to say in terms of actual plots, as she was much more occupied with saying it in an artsy-fartsy fashion.
  
  I could go on and on about this, but it'd end up like her memoir. 90% of my issue with the book was the writing. I just couldn't stand it. It was trying way, way too hard and took me right out of it. And if you write like that and actually are saying something, or sticking to a sequence of events, then fine. But there was nothing "holding" me to it, I guess.
• 
  Kasa Cotugno

  This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read. Anthony Bourdain calls it the best food memoir, but it is so much more than that. The fact that she holds a degree in writing but not in culinary arts is remarkable seeing that she's truly made her mark in the kitchen, opening her own restaurant with experience as a line cook and freelance catering worker, never having run a kitchen but knowing exactly what she wanted the place to look like and what she wanted to serve. Bourdain has said that Prune, her restaurant, the result of that sharply honed instinct, is where given the chance chefs go to dine. The fact that she is such a gifted writer must be a revelation to fans of her cooking. Not the least fascinating aspect of her stunning success is the fact that she never had formal training, but had had cooking experience from a very young age, learning tools of her trade through her mother's skill at feeding a family of seven employing imagination and taste even if the finances were at best sketchy. Gabrielle's journey through life to this point unfolds like a work of literature, including wonderful characterizations including an unflinching self portrait. Her relationship with her family and her Italian in-laws which encompasses the final third of the book is worthy of an entire book in itself. This was one I was sorry to see end.
• 
  Melodie

  I thought this was a memoir I would really enjoy. Unfortunately, for the most part I did not. Ms Hamilton's unconventional childhood and culinary education were interesting.Opening and running a successful restaurant is no easy feat. And she was brutally honest about all that it entails. However, her overall sense of superiority quickly became off putting and tedious.
  She bogged me down in the minutia of her personal life. I found nothing for her to be proud of let alone crow about as she details her criminal activity as a young adult. And her marriage that she describes as performance art is a cautionary tale of what happens when two self involved people come together.
  A disappointment.
  
  
  
• 
  Autumn

  And now I want to have a dinner party.