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Blood, Bones, and Butter

April 25, 2012 By Wendell Collins

I love good food. It can be plain, it can be fancy, but you can tell when it's good. And after reading Blood, Bones and Butter, I am confident that a meal at Prune in NYC will mean good food.

I also love good writing. (Or rather, I am less fond of bad writing). Gabrielle Hamilton has managed to combine both - a feat that is rare in the genre of foodie writing - in Blood, Bones and Butter.

Our book club recently read BBB and then shared a wonderful dinner and discussion of the book just down the river from where Gabrielle grew up (if you can call it that) in Lambertville. The consensus - great book, great food. There are plenty of top chefs out there who have tried their hand at writing, the most successful recently being Kitchen Confidential, but generally the books are more about the food and the industry and the characters, and less about the chef who wrote it. (Julia Child stands out as a rare exception - her cookbooks are as much a reflection of her spunk and quirky sensibility as anyone's.)

But Blood, Bones, and Butter is not just a food book - it's a real memoir. Poignant, funny, covering dark topics and recalling the ups and downs of a topsy turvy life. It spoke to me and my fellow book clubbers about the challenges of motherhood, entrepreneurship, relationships, growing up, growing old, becoming one's mother, and taking charge of one's life.

And leaving our mouths watering for the next perfect omelette or paragraph.