She has a master's in fine arts in fiction writing from the University of Michigan and was nominated for the James Beard Award for Best Chef of New York City in 2010. Gabrielle Hamilton opened Prune in New York City in 1999 after traveling through France, Italy and Greece. Hamilton's descriptions of what she longed to create in Prune - a place where the waiter "would bring you something to eat or drink that you didn't even ask for when you arrived cold and early and undone by your day in the city" - will make you want to book a table and, if necessary, an airline ticket. Most notably, since 1999, Hamilton has owned Prune, a 30-seat East Village bistro with a cult following. She began washing dishes in a hometown restaurant at 13, moved on to waitressing in Manhattan, and has worked, off and on, in professional kitchens ever since. (A characteristically crisp yet sensual description: "The lambs roasted so slowly and patiently that their blood dripped down into the coals with a hypnotic and rhythmic hiss, which sounded like the hot tip of a just-blown-out match dropped into a cup of water.") Hamilton here establishes the memory of lost wholeness - of a lost home - that haunts the rest of the book.Īfter her parents divorced, when Hamilton was 11, she essentially went spinning out into the world on her own, a precocious adolescent with a badass attitude in a shoplifted red tube top and spike-heeled sandals. Hamilton opens the book with an elegiac account of the party her bohemian parents threw at their rural Pennsylvania home each year of her 1970s childhood, an enormous outdoor lamb roast that was as much a work of theater as it was a feast. "You could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough," she writes, "like a woman behind a shower curtain." She can and does, in the course of a page, go from poignant to bitchy to self-critical to rhapsodic and back, and she is never, ever boring.
Hamilton moves easily from rich metaphor to dark humor, from dreamy abstraction to the vivid and precise descriptions of anything from a maggot-infested rat to a plate of beautiful ravioli. While her roasted marrowbones may be great, her prose is virtuoso. Unlike Mario and Emeril and Bobby and Alice, Hamilton, the chef/owner of the Manhattan bistro Prune, hasn't become a household name, and if she ever does, it might just be for her writing, not her cooking. This is Hamilton's first book, and I wanted more - right now! - of that voice, that wit, that spiky sensibility. I read until dark, in a bit of a trance, and experienced an uncommon feeling of desolation as the number of pages began to dwindle. Recently, I began flipping through Gabrielle Hamilton's new memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter, while eating lunch, and after three pages, I canceled my afternoon plans.
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