Blood, Bones and Butter

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is a memoir by chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton, published in 2011. Hamilton describes her personal and professional journey from childhood to becoming chef-owner of the award-winning New York City restaurant, Prune. Renowned celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain describes Blood, Bones & Butter as “Magnificent. Simply the best memoir by a chef ever.” With engaging honesty, Hamilton describes how her life, with all its challenges and joys, is inescapably intertwined with both food and writing. In an interview with The Guardian, Hamilton likens the fun part of writing her memoir to fine-tuning a recipe, when she “developed the muscle and discipline to take care of the story in the exact same way I would take care of the food in my restaurant—when I became able to determine what was too ‘salty’, too ‘rare’, too ‘sandy’ about the text in front of me.”

Hamilton is born in 1966, the youngest of five children. She and her brothers and sisters grow up in a large, rural home in New Hope, Pennsylvania. They spend an idyllic childhood running wild outdoors and playing with the neighbor kids. Something of a tomboy, Hamilton comments “We got ringworm, broken bones, tetanus, concussions, stitches, and ivy poisoning.” Hamilton’s French mother, Madeline, lives in the kitchen and rules the house with “an oily wooden spoon in her hand.” Hamilton absorbs her mother’s knowledge about French cooking. Hamilton’s father is a set-designer for theatrical and trade shows, who makes and sees the “romance” in the scenery he builds—from sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus, to elaborately staged parties he and Madeline would give. Hamilton fondly remembers her father’s epic spring lamb roast.

When Hamilton is 11 years old, going on 12, her parents divorce and Hamilton’s life changes. She “had no clue” that her parents had been unhappy with each other. Her mother moves to Vermont, leaving Hamilton and her 17-year-old brother Simon in their father’s care. At 12 years old, Hamilton lies about her age and gets a job in a local tourist restaurant, peeling potatoes and washing dishes. She feels “at home” in the kitchen. With her parents largely absent during her teen years, Hamilton “razed through the menu of adult behavior and tried on whatever seemed attractive.” She shoplifts, curses like a sailor, steals money from neighbors’ coats when they visit for parties, steals cars, experiments with drugs, and almost gets arrested.



Hamilton moves to Manhattan when she is 16, sharing a roach-filled apartment with her sister. Hamilton begins waitressing and finds herself pulled back into the food industry, working various jobs including a stint as a cook at a children’s summer camp. Hamilton is accepted into the graduate program at the University of Michigan and pursues an MFA in fiction writing. While there, she takes a job at a catering company and meets Misty Callies, a caterer who becomes a mentor to Hamilton. In 1986, Hamilton travels to Europe, cooking her way through Greece and Turkey, and learning more about French cooking from her mother’s relatives. With little money, and little to eat during her travels, Hamilton comes to see hunger “as a part of my training as a cook.”

in 1999, despite never attending culinary school, Hamilton opens her restaurant, Prune, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to great acclaim. Named after the pet name her mother called her when she was young, Prune is a small, 30-seat bistro where Hamilton serves the kind of foods she likes to eat; elevated comfort food. She eschews pretention, declaring that the only thing she’d serve in a martini glass is a martini.

Hamilton describes her rigorous work ethic and the routines she sets in place at the restaurant. She reveals that restaurant work is largely hard and unglamorous. She describes cleaning up dead rat carcasses in the alley behind the restaurant and disposing of piles of feces left by passing bums. Prune becomes highly successful. Speaking at a conference, Hamilton reveals her passion for a gender-neutral kitchen, saying “I can’t understand for one second what the difference is between a male chef and a female chef—the food has to be cooked and we all cook it.”



Over the years, Hamilton has intimate relationships with several women, but marries Dr. Michele Fuortes, an Italian-born teacher and researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College who is ten years older than her. Hamilton calls him her “Italian Italian.” The two have little in common besides their shared love of food and their shared love of Fuortes’s Italian mother, Alda. Hamilton and Fuortes take annual trips to visit his family in Italy, and, despite the language barrier, Hamilton develops a close bond while cooking with Alda. She looks forward to the summer trips.

Hamilton’s relationship with Fuortes is troubled, however. She refers to their wedding ceremony as “performance art.” They live separately, and she acknowledges that she does not love him. Still, she and Fuortes have two children within 20 months: Marco and Leone. Hamilton struggles to balance her time between restaurant ownership and caring for the newborns.

After twenty years, Hamilton reunites with her mother at the advent of her brother’s death. Near the end of the book, Hamilton suggests that she and Fuortes are going to discuss a divorce.



In a 2018 interview with Eater, Hamilton announced that she is working on a second memoir, tentatively titled Kind Regards. Hamilton published Prune, a collection of signature recipes from her restaurant, in 2014.