Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

(Random House, $26)

“The chef-owner of New York’s much-loved restaurant Prune wields a pen that cuts like a knife,” said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. Gabrielle Hamilton’s “vinegary” new memoir begins with a few fond memories from her criminal past. A shoplifter at 13, she cut out of rural Pennsylvania at 16 to work in a bar in Greenwich Village, where the other waitresses taught her more-efficient methods of stealing. For years, she drifted through mediocre catering kitchens across the city before she happened upon a rundown space in the East Village that was available for lease. “I had nothing, in the traditional sense, to qualify me as a chef or business owner,” she writes. What she did have was “memories of food she loved growing up” and an honest approach to cooking.

That honesty carries through in Hamilton’s writing, said Joe Yonan in The Washington Post. Her “visceral” prose consistently strips professional kitchen work “down to its least glamorous realities.” There are maggot-filled dead rats to deal with, a line cook who up and quits when Hamilton is nine months pregnant, and enough other wild tales to put Blood, Bones & Butter in the company of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential as one of the best chef’s memoirs ever. And this one’s by a chef who changed our dining habits. Hamilton illuminates here the “stripped-down, let’s-just-have-a-dinner-party cooking philosophy” that has defined her restaurant and made her one of New York’s most influential chefs.

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Unlike Bourdain, Hamilton hasn’t yet become “a household name,” said Jennifer Reese in NPR.org. “If she ever does, it might just be for her writing.” As good as her “roasted marrowbones” may be, “her prose is virtuoso.” She can move effortlessly from all the “swearing and drama” to a poetic description of ravioli: “You could see the herbs and the ricotta through the dough, like a woman behind a shower curtain.” Maybe instead of “all that frying and whisking,” what Hamilton “should have been doing all these years was writing.”