Blood Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune she spent twenty fierce hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that in her adult years eluded her. Hamilton’s ease and comfort in a kitchen were instilled in her at an early age when her parents hosted grand parties often for more than one hundred friends and neighbors. The smells of spit-roasted lamb apple wood smoke and rosemary garlic marinade became as necessary to her as her own skin.

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; the soulless catering factories that helped pay the rent; 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 difficult and prickly marriage that nonetheless yields rich and lasting dividends.

Blood Bones & Butter is an unflinching and lyrical work. Gabrielle Hamilton’s story is told with uncommon honesty grit humor and passion. By turns epic and intimate it marks the debut of a tremendous literary talent.

“I wanted the lettuce and eggs at room temperature . . . the butter-and-sugar sandwiches we ate after school for snack . . . the marrow bones my mother made us eat as kids that I grew to crave as an adult. . . . There would be no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food just the salty sweet starchy brothy crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin.”[]

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