“I was unprepared for page after page of such sharp, carefully crafted, ballistically precise sentences,” confessed Anthony Bourdain, bestselling author and renowned chef. “Blood, Bones and Butter is, quite simply, the far-and-away best chef or food-genre memoir…ever. Ever. It certainly kicked the hell out of my Kitchen Confidential, which suddenly, in a second, felt shallow, sophomoric and ultimately lightweight.”
Hamilton invites readers along on a journey through her life, which began in rural Pennsylvania with two “incredibly special” parents, until a bitter divorce left the 16-year-old struggling on her own in New York City. “To be picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became the single most important food experience I came back to over and over,” she writes.
The chef, mother and wife, summed the book and its title up in a recent interview with The Washington Post. “The book is about my family and bloodline. And being a chef has all this structure, like a skeleton,” she tells the paper. “Butter doesn’st land as easily, but I was just thinking about the creamy, good stuff, like my kids and my Italian in-laws.”
