The bird started to orient.”īut those are side dishes to Hamilton’s main course: the story of her search for identity and belonging after her parents’ divorce in her early adolescence. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. As her dismayed father watched, she spun the bird around to disorient it, laid its head on the block and raised the hatchet: “This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. She manages to make an account of killing a chicken just as poetic (if more gruesome). “Then, with a deep ten-ounce ladle, I pushed down in the center, and the tortilla came up around the bowl like the long dress and underskirts of a Victorian woman who had fallen, fully clothed, into a lake, her skirts billowing up around her heavy sinking body.” She turns something as mundane as the deep-frying of “stacks and stacks” of flour tortillas at a touristy Pennsylvania restaurant when she was 15, for instance, into a duo of evocative metaphors: The tortilla “would float and sizzle on the surface for a moment like a lily pad on a pond,” she writes. To read “Blood, Bones & Butter” is to marvel at Hamilton’s masterful facility with language. But as he admits in his jacket testimonial, she’s the superior writer by a mile. Hamilton, chef-owner of the tiny Greenwich Village restaurant Prune, shares two of Bourdain’s traits: a wicked, sometimes obscene sense of humor and a past checkered with drug use and crime. That quote, by the way, is from the previous title holder, Anthony Bourdain, whose 2000 blockbuster, “ Kitchen Confidential,” hilariously deglamorized restaurants while simultaneously feeding the fire of public obsession with celebrity chefs.
Sure enough, Hamilton quickly proves that her decade-in-the-making work can live up to the extraordinary “best memoir by a chef ever” hype. Along with the title, it’s the first clue that Hamilton’s story will be visceral and possibly even revelatory. Turning the cover upside down reveals the unmistakable head - severed, one assumes - of a glaring, sharp-beaked rooster. Then you realize that the pearl is an eye and those frills are feathers. Is this the futuristic creation of some modernist chef? A strange image graces the cover of Gabrielle Hamilton’s luminous new memoir, “ Blood, Bones & Butter.” At first glance it might be an oyster, slipping off its half shell and nestled in some kind of grassy nest, with a pearl at its center and frills underneath.
0 kommentar(er)
