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Blood Bones and Butter and Life on the Line
Food Dance - Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Blood Bones and Butter and Life on the Line
There are many women who have influenced my life of food: Alice Waters, Madeline Kamman, Julia Child, Sheila Lukins, Judy Rogers, Odessa Piper, my friend Chris Morgan and now Gabrielle Hamilton author of Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Gabrielle owns Prune, a very successful small restaurant in NYC’s East Village. She is, as well, a damn good writer!
I am in a book group. Well it is fair to say it is part book group, part food sharing, part renewing friendships (some new, some very old) all woven into the best sort of new millennium “support group” you can imagine. However, Gabrielle’s book wasn’t on our list to read. Every time I read a book that I can’t put down I tell everyone I know: friends, customers, my staff and my husband, “You should really read ________; it is so fantastic!” Blood, Bones, and Butter is no exception. I love to read books about women who are passionate about food; those women also being a bit offbeat and successful is just a bonus. I related so much to this book. Not to the crazy family she comes from (mine wasn’t that colorful) but to Gabrielle’s journey to her current life, her business of cooking for and sharing meals with her community. She, like myself, wants to cook simply using real food. She writes of her newly dreamed of restaurant “there would be no foam, and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry.” Throw in the pure pleasure of feeding people and I am there.
Hamilton writes, “I had no idea how to open a restaurant. I had the work ethic and that nearly strange mania for cleaning and organizing kitchens.” That mirrors my own journey to where I am now. I highly recommend you pick up this book now available in our Market and carve out some time to savor the passion that exudes from the pages.
In contrast to Gabrielle’s book, I also just finished reading Grant Achatz’s book Life on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat. Grant is the ultra driven, risk taking, visionary chef that is part owner of Alinea restaurant in Chicago. In 2002 the James Beard Foundation named Grant “Rising Star Chef”and in 2005 Gourmet declared Alinea the best restaurant in America. Then 2007 Grant was diagnosed with stage four squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth–tongue cancer. Yes, the irony is too much to bear. In 2008 The James Beard Foundation awarded him Outstanding Chef in America, the highest honor for a chef.
In this curious memoir, Chef Grant Achatz and his business partner, Nick Kokonas tell of their Chicago restaurant, Alinea, as well as Grant’s cancer diagnosis and recovery. I found the frank honesty of Grant’s journey intensely personal, interesting and inspiring. He shares his family, his schooling and the time he spent with his mentor Thomas Keller. A legend in his own right, Keller is Chef and owner of The French Laundry, a Napa Valley icon, and one of the most humble, creative and talented chefs of our time. All of the intimate details of working in the kitchen of such a legend painted a picture for me that allowed me ‘to feel’ what it was like to be a part of it. There are parts that are almost too painful to read about during Grant’s long illness. Those parts I wanted to hurry through in order to know how it is now for Grant. Having Nick’s voice telling the story of his friend and business partner gave the book a richness and depth that can be at times be lacking in first person memoirs.
I have yet to experience the privilege of eating at Prune, Alinea or The French Laundry but through theses books I am one step closer.
—Julie Stanley
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Comments
EC has some connections there!