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

by Drew Lazor

That's Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/owner of New York's Prune, describing what will go wrong during a typical Sunday brunch service at her East Village restaurant, where the tiny 30-seat bistro can crank out 200 covers in five hours. But it also works as a poignant summation of Hamilton's lush, roundabout journey through the bowels of professional cooking, outlined with incredible wit, lyricism and candor in Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (Random House, March 1).

The memoir has received scads of advance praise from heavyweights like Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali, but there is no buddy-chef duplicity to suspect here — Hamilton, who's got an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan (see Chapter 7 for her uproarious ridicule of a classmate's sodden, pretentious poetry), is absolutely the real deal.

That much is clear early, in Hamilton's recollections of growing up on the border of New Hope and Lambertville, the youngest daughter of a French ballet dancer who stocked a magical pantry and an odd, flighty artist father who built theatrical sets for a living. Hamilton's descriptions surrounding her family's elaborate lamb roasts — of walking barefoot into an ice-cold stream to retrieve Heinekens and jugs of Chablis for guests; or of her dad basting the animals with a makeshift cheesecloth brush dipped into a paint can filled with olive oil, rosemary, garlic and lemon — are glassy and gorgeous.

But it's Hamilton's in-no-way-chronological abandonment of the nest, and her subsequent false starts — waitressing in New York (she gets accused of grand larceny), taking on an impenetrable undergraduate degree at Hampshire College, toiling in the trenches of emotionless big-city catering operations, or backpacking, alternately cooking and starving, through Europe — that serve the most vital duty, attributing meaning to the mania and coaxing along her intense, nearly voyeuristic personal narrative.

When she lands back in the Big Apple, pre-Prune, you can nearly feel the "thin blue line of electricity" that shoots through her body the first time she steps into the feculent space that will eventually become her restaurant. You are crestfallen when the food-addled love she so beautifully cultivated with her husband in Italy doesn't translate back to the States. You are reminded of your own strained and/or sumptuous relationships with your siblings during every conversation with her sister, Melissa ("Her purpose is to take a long luxurious bath in my ear"), and every lamentation that she'll never be as close with the rest of her family.

Self-referential without being self-important, difficult and challenging without being neurotic, Blood, Bones & Butter is a book for food lovers, but you needn't know a persimmon from a paillard to realize it's also a book about life.

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)