Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

This makes it, as the kids say, very relate-able. In fact, the reader wonders if she’ll ever stop drinking, smoking, drug-taking and grad-schooling long enough to settle into a serious culinary career. As you might imagine, this makes her a rather independent young teen, a female Huck Finn-meets-The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, who isn’t in the industry to satisfy her childhood love of lamb roasts but, rather, to make money to eat. Clover and chanterelles can only get you so far, so she has to get her first job - in the restaurant industry.

Mother looms large in this book, both as a symbol of style and grace who could both get milk fresh from farm “as only a French woman can - in a heel, a silk scarf, and a cashmere skirt” - and as a scaled-down candidate for a villainous matriarch in a misery memoir.Īfter divorce puts an abrupt halt to this vision of pastoral utopia, 13-year-old Gabrielle and her slightly older brother are essentially abandoned for a summer. There she ran barefoot, picking clover and chanterelles, mingled with half-lit adults, retrieving cold drinks from the stream during the huge lamb roast parties her father held, and spent the rest of her time nestled in her mother’s lap, enjoying her favoured child status. She grew up, with four siblings, parented by a glamorous artist couple gone back to the land - perhaps not entirely for philosophical reasons - in a “castle” built into the ruins of an old mill in rural Pennsylvania.

She has no shortage of material for this task. Hamilton is one of the few to realize that food alone is not enough for an entire book and writers have to draw from other parts of their lives for a real memoir. We’re happy to report, however, that the water here is plenty warm enough to wade in, partly because it’s hardly just about food. After all, some of the food memoir fatigue has to do with the fact that few of those culinary lives really warranted an entire book. It is with some trepidation, then, that we approach Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton. There were simply too many books with tantalizing single-word titles with charming double meanings evoking the whole cooking-is-a-metaphor-for-life trope ( Deglazed, Stewed or Caramelized). A year or two ago, if somebody had proposed a moratorium on culinary memoirs, it might have mustered a lot of support.

Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton