Blood, Bones, and Butter Review

This week, I read Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton.  I've been researching kitchen culture in high end restaurants, and the internet recommended this to me.   The internet shouldn't have, because that's not what this book is about (and if fact does a big old time leap as soon as she gets her restaurant set up, jumping over everything I went in wanting to know).  But my disappointment has nothing to do with the quality of the book.

Gabrielle tells the story of her life as it relates to food.  She starts with her early childhood with her French mother who cooked elaborate meals for a family of seven on a tight budget, and with her father who threw huge, themed parties.  She talks about waitressing at The Lone Star Cafe, where she was brought up on charges of grand larceny.  She talks about the grueling hours and stifling menu constraints of catering.  She talks about traveling the world to learn to cook from little bistros all over Europe and Asia.  And then she talks about running a restaurant while trying to have it all with her green card marriage husband and her two small kids.

The prose here is gorgeous.  It's not just her descriptions of food that impressed me (although I always love great descriptions of food), but she also throws in these very pointed and specific details that are instantly relatable.  For example, she describes her face tightening when hit by the heat from an oven, where I've always thought of heat expanding the pores on my face.  Those are opposite images, but somehow they're still the same thing, and I know exactly what she's talking about.

The chapters are thematic, almost as if the book is a collection of essays put in sort-of-chronological order.  As I said, there's a chapter on her deciding that she's going to buy the vacant, filthy restaurant space down the block without knowing anything about running a restaurant, and then the next chapter starts with the restaurant having been open for a year or two and she's a guest star on the Martha Stewart show.  It's a leap.  She speaks of her mother early in the book with rose colored adoration, but the next time her mom shows up, Gabrielle hasn't spoken to her in twenty years and is desperately trying not to become her.  The book follows Gabrielle's relationship to food rather than other character arcs.  There's some implicit assumptions here that we know who she is and that her restaurant is famous, an assumption most people going into this would know.  For that reason, it shows moments that are emblematic of a whole, it tells stories as examples that the reader can generalize out into a larger picture. 

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Next week: We Wear the Mask: 15 Stories of Passing in America.