Anthony Bourdain isn’t exactly stingy when it comes to giving blurbs, but his endorsement of Prune chef and owner Gabrielle Hamilton’s forthcoming memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter is flat-out over the top: “Magnificent,” Bourdain drools. “Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. EVER. Gabrielle Hamilton packs more heart, soul, and pure power into one beautifully crafted page than I’ve accomplished in my entire writing career…. I am choked with envy.” This, about a memoir by a woman who recently said she is “not a food writer.”
As if Bourdain’s anointment—which takes up literally the entire front cover of the galley--weren’t enough, Mario Batali also steps up with a rave beyond compare, this one plastered on the galley’s back cover: “Hamilton has changed the potential and raised the bar for all books about eating and cooking…. I will read this book to my children and then burn all the books I have written for pretending to be anything even close to this. After that I will apply for the dishwasher job at Prune to learn from my new queen.”
Reading Blood, however, it becomes clear that such effusive praise may actually be warranted. “I stole fistfuls of ketchup packets from all the McDonalds on Eighth Avenue and I’d make pasta ‘sauce’ with it,” Hamilton writes, recalling her early days in New York City, 16 years old and living in a roach-infested apartment on 29th St. and 10th Ave. Hamilton hangs out with hookers on the stoop of her building in the morning, eating foil-wrapped egg-and-cheese sandwiches and “feigning total nonchalance regarding the elaborate production going on around me involving Tina, and the laying out of a single baby wipe on the step before placing her totally naked ass on it.” (No wonder Bourdain is such a fan.)
PW will offer its official review soon, but until then, I’d like to offer my own (Random House, feel free to insert this into all new galleys you send out): “Move over, celebrity cupcake bakers, molecular gastronomists, locavores, and other assorted foodies: a new food writing hero is here. Gabrielle Hamilton might hate that title just as much as she despises being called a ‘female chef,’ but she deserves it--and goes beyond it. Her memoir transcends food writing and is just plain good writing. Is there room on the shelves for another food memoir? Yes. Especially if that memoir is Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter.”
