“Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.” The title says it all, doesn’t it?
It’s the new memoir (Random House) by Chef-Proprietor Gabrielle Hamilton of much-loved Prune restaurant in New York, which is adored by other chefs for its soulful, no-nonsense approach, as well as for its roasted marrow bones, fried sweetbreads and extensive menu of Bloody Marys.
I’ve always been impressed by the articles Hamilton has penned for the New York Times Dining section. With a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, she’s one chef who really knows how to craft a beautiful, evocative sentence.
I just started reading her book (which I received a review copy of). It’s a frank, honest recounting of her rather bohemian childhood, raised by her set designer father and former ballerina mother in a burnt-out, 19th Century silk mill in rural Pennsylvania, where they threw great parties complete with baby lambs roasting on spits and wine bottles chilling in the nearby creek. That life came crashing down when her parents split up when Hamilton was only in her teens. She started smoking, shop-lifting and got her first job washing dishes in a restaurant when she was only 13.
She spent many tumultuous years trying to find herself, before opening her restaurant, which she called “prune,” after the nickname her mother had for her as a child.
As she wrote about her vision for the restaurant, “There would be no foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food; just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. There would be nothing tall on the plate, the portions would be generous, there would be no emulsions, no crab cocktail served in a martini glass with its claw hanging over the rim. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin. I wanted all of that crammed into this little filthy gem….”
Meet Hamilton when she visits the Bay Area this week. She’ll host a dinner with Book Passage at Left Bank restaurant in Larkspur, 6:30 p.m. March 10. Tickets are $100 per person or $170 per couple, and includes dinner and a signed copy of her book.
March 11, she’ll conduct a book-signing at noon on March 11 at Rakestraw Books in Danville. Tickets are $20 each. Reservations are required by calling (925) 837-7337. Then, that evening, she’ll be the guest at a special dinner at Camino restaurant in Oakland. The evening starts at 6 p.m. with Negronis, hors d’oeuvres and a book-signing, followed by dinner at about 7 p.m. Tickets are $100 per person. Reservations are required.
March 12 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., Hamilton will swing by Omnivore Books in San Francisco for a book-signing.
If you miss those events, you’ll be glad to know that Food Gal is giving away one free copy of Hamilton’s book.
Contest: Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be taken through midnight PST March 12. Winner will be announced March 14.
How to win?
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