Blood, Bones & Butter: A Lesson in Badassery

Blood, Bones, & Butter: the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is a book that came to me at just the right time. I needed to find some “grrr” for my personal and professional life and Hamilton provided some tips in her memoir. I found it in an internet black hole of food blogs and ordered it immediately from the library. Since it was a couple years old, there wasn’t a single hold on it and I had in my hands two days after placing the request.

In the book, Hamilton recalls her life and how it lead to her career as a chef and a writer. She begins with her fanciful childhood, her turbulent teenage years, the wanderlust 20s, nose-to-the-grindstone 30s, and ambitious/confusing/romantically-fraught 40s. Some of the best chefs in the business gave her book RAVE reviews and the year it was published she won TWO James Beard awards. One for Best Chef in New York City and the other for Writing and Literature. Not that she holds too much clout in the awards, judging by her acceptance speech, “All you have to do is open a can of sardines and a box of Triscuits, call it a signature dish, and you get Best Chef New York City.” See? Badass.

photo courtesy of bon appetit

I finished Blood, Bones, & Butter in two days. I guess you could say I loved it. As I proudly added it to my GoodReads collection, I noticed some reviewers called her egotistical but I disagree. I felt her prose was empowered because it’s straight-up and real. I really don’t need to read another book of a very accomplished woman being humble about everything she’s done. Hamilton owns her experiences and her failures. After I read a memoir, I always end up recollecting a discussion I had in university about whether memoir is actually fiction and fiction is closer to memoir due to most people’s poor recollection of their memories and the human inadequacy to accurately reflect on their own behaviours in general.

Critics also bemoaned that she didn’t explore her emotions enough while complaining in the same paragraph that she played the ‘poor me’ card too much. This is another problem with memoirs, some people will always dump on what you’ve written about your life. The way I see it, people fall upon hard times and it often takes a lifetime trying to figure it out. Sometimes, it’s not even worth figuring it out and more valuable to say it happened and move forward.

Here are the flagged lessons of badassery I took from her memoir.

On traveling

This kind of travel, so distinctly prior to ATMs, debit cards, cash advance credit cards, cell phones, Facebook, and international SIM cards is probably not even possible now. And it isn’t right to romanticize it; you, with feathery mind and a too light body, sitting on your heavy pack with out a penny of local currancy, down to your last two hundred and sixty dollars in traveler’s checks, with not one person on earth able to locate you on a map in any more than the most general terms, and the local American Express office closed until Tuesday because of some local holiday or labour strike.

It gets better for Hamilton in Greece.

I made my home in a little hut I had built on the beach. I showered in the ocean, shat behind the rocks, slept under the stars, and spent those early days in Serifos wandering the mountainside.

Gender Politics bullshit

Identity politics never ends up going the distance for me. The categories tend to fall apart on me when I rely on them too heavily – gay people, women, whatever. Every time I think I can rely on a group or a category- like my sister women or my sister lesbians or whatever … the women on my panel say ridiculous things about women’s superiority or the lesbians go out and start voting Republican – and the whole thing caves in on me, and I start to mistrust my own kind. Especially when they start saying things like “Women are better than men.”

How to deal with a difficult person who lives above you

Annie memorized our phone number the day it was published and calls us every day to tell us to turn down the music. And she’s got us on redial. In the first few months, we were energetically neighbourly and ultra-accomodating to all of the needs of the people in the building … until we realized that when you open a restaurant, you are a magnet for every lonely, angry, unfulfilled New Yorker who can’t afford a better apartment, a haircut, or a meal in a decent restaurant. These people make for entertaining characters in your journal or your published essay or your after-work-with-beers bullshit session.

On being a badass

It’s possible that working that brunch egg shift at thirty-nine weeks pregnant is badass. And also possible that biting the bullet and scheduling your own labour is badass. But badass is the last thing I’m interested in being. Badass is a juvenile aspiration.

At thirteen, when I was stealing cars and smoking cigarettes I wanted to be badass. At sixteen, coked out of my head and slinging chili at the Lone Star Cafe, I was the understudy to badass, and I knew all her lines and cues. At twenty-five, blow torching my way through warehouse catering kitchens, cranking out back-to-back doubles, and napping in between on the office floor with my head on a pile of aprons and checked pants, I was authentically badass. But at thirty-eight years old, hugely pregnant with my future tiny, precious son, I don’t want anything to do with badass. I want to be J.Crew catalogue clean.

Straight-up good advice

Put your head down and do your job and let the recognition end of things sort itself out.

Overall, I enjoyed the first two thirds of the book (Blood and Bones) better than the last third (Butter). Possibly, because I’m not married with two kids and a very busy NYC restaurant so I couldn’t really identify. However, there were multiple times throughout the book I thought, “Yup, I get it.’ or ” I should really try this approach” like when dealing with difficult neighbours (wink!).

I particularly love how she emphasizes that one doesn’t have to base their career off of their passion and that it can be equally fulfilling to have a job to pay the bills while still working to produce art. In Hamilton’s case, art is her successful writing career. She has a MFA from the University of Iowa.

I’m a little late joining the Gabrielle Hamilton party because she released a new cookbook in December and I just found out this week! I have a feeling I’m going to be adding both of her books as a set to my personal library.

Hamilton’s new cookbook Prune, named after her restaurant, is said to be much different from most cookbooks. It’s strictly recipes with little handwritten notes in the margins as if the cookbook was written for her line chefs.

Reviews from numerous papers say that it doesn’t lead you by the hand or console nervous chefs but it doesn’t talk down to you either. If this signifies an upcoming shift in cookbook writing, I love it.