Chef, author Gabrielle Hamilton blends her passions - KansasCity.com

Gabrielle Hamilton does not want to be known as a female Anthony Bourdain.

?I just want to write and cook. I don?t want to be a female writer or a female cook,? the chef/author of the best-seller ?Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef? (Random House) said during a recent stop in Kansas City to promote the release of her book in paperback.Bourdain, whose best-selling ?Kitchen Confidential? set the bar for chef-driven memoirs a few years ago, really couldn?t have come up with a more succinct or generous blurb for Hamilton?s book jacket: ?Magnificent. Simply the best memoir by a chef ever. Ever.?After Bourdain hosted an episode of his Travel Channel show ?No Reservations? at Prune, Hamilton?s 30-seat restaurant in New York?s East Village, receipts shot up 60 percent as new customers flocked to order such simple dishes as radishes with butter, roasted marrow and prawns in anchovy butter.?He?s generous and kind that way,? she said, adding a plug for Bourdain. ???Kitchen Confidential? is an anthem for restaurant line cooks around the world.?But for the five years Hamilton spent writing the memoir, people continually dogged her with refrains of, ?Oh, are you writing the female ?Kitchen Confidential???If Hamilton?s memoir is less macho than Bourdain?s, it is no less gritty in detailing her 20-year journey in search of family and a place at the table. The memoir starts with an idyllic, close-knit, rural upbringing that is shattered by her parents? ugly divorce. Cast adrift to finish raising herself, she spends her teen years scraping by as a dishwasher, waitress and bartender. When she needs to get out of town after getting caught working in a bar while still underage, she travels the world and enjoys the hospitality of strangers. Back home, she winds up working an assembly-line catering gig. She turns to writing for a change of pace, but to her surprise finds she misses the kitchen and eventually opens Prune. One day a charming Italian man walks into the restaurant and, despite their rocky romance, she is eventually welcomed into his close-knit family.So does Hamilton consider herself more of a cook or a writer??Kitchen work is not conducive to writing,? Hamilton said when we met at the Crossroads Coffeehouse for an interview. ?There?s no way around it. It?s manual labor. It?s hard to crack open a notebook after a shift in the kitchen. It?s more like you just want to drink and smoke.?Hamilton has kept a journal since age 6 and always dreamed of becoming a writer. At 30 she headed to the University of Michigan to work on a master?s degree in fiction writing. But her time in academia felt stilted, lonely and unfocused. She missed the connection to real people and real life. Despite her recent brush with literary fame, she still enjoys hanging out with her line cooks more than she enjoys attending literary events.?There?s no pretense. They just eat and drink,? she said. ?In the end, I like to have a job that keeps me in life, and to have writing as a kind of entertainment and cerebral outlet. It can be nice to get to the page (after a long day).?She places a higher value on writing than cooking.?I don?t tend to weep at a plate of food,? she said. ?I?m not into food-gasm.?Rather than putting food on a pedestal, Hamilton portrays cooking as a ritual that keeps her grounded ? a craft rather than an art. ?It doesn?t last,? she said of a beautiful plate of food that is demolished by a diner in just a few bites, ?but people are going to look at Rodin?s work for centuries.?Her essay ?Blood, Bones & Baked Eggplant,? which originally appeared in Bon App?tit, has been nominated for a 2012 James Beard Award. (Winners will be announced in May.) The essay has become an epilogue to the paperback version of her book. This time Hamilton heads to Italy without her distant, uncommunicative husband and two young children in tow, determined to figure out whether she can maintain a post-divorce relationship with her mother-in-law, Alda. The final installment came after many readers told her they wanted to know what happened to her relationships after the hardback cover closed.Memoir can be a ?dicey? genre, and Hamilton has no stomach for the overly confessional or revenge-seeking type. An author?s note indicates some characters were changed, and sometimes time was compressed for the good of the larger story. Because of the ?inaccuracy of memory,? she asked everyone in the book to read a manuscript. ?It was completely vetted by everyone,? she said.Except, of course, her boys, ages 5 and 7.?I?m not worried about them reading the book at all,? she said. ?I hope I?m raising boys who will be open to the whole range of human experience and generous toward that kind of experience and empathetic.?When former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni popped into Prune for the no-reservations Sunday brunch a year ago, Chelsea Clinton was seated at a nearby table. ?It is easy to see why Prune is so widely and fervently loved,? Bruni wrote. ?It has mirth to spare, moxie to burn. It listens to its own muse and operates by a credo of whimsical indulgence.? It?s the kind of publicity that can change people, yet the food she serves remains the same as ever, even if the price has gone up. Marrow bones, a staple of her Prune menu, have climbed from $3.95 a pound in 1999 when she first opened the restaurant to $8 a pound.And there seems little risk of Hamilton following in Bourdain?s globe-trotting food TV footsteps. For starters, she rarely watches TV, she has a no-cellphones rule in the dining room and she refuses to start a Facebook page. ?Facebook is a time suck,? she said. ?It makes me feel like I?ve eaten at McDonald?s. A lot of empty calories. I don?t have time for that.?After all, Hamilton is a working mom. So, yes, chicken nuggets have been known to show up at the dinner table, but not fast-food nuggets ? homemade chicken nuggets. ?My kids eat a lot of white food,? she said with a laugh. ?They?re still very much in that suspicious-of-food beige stage. Everyone will come to food in their time. To me it?s a waste of worry and energy. If my biggest problem is white food, I?m OK.? Next on her plate: ?The Prune Cookbook,? due out in 2014. But is writing a recipe as satisfying as writing a food memoir??Are you kidding? It?s a freaking pleasure,? she said. ?There?s still room for voice, but it?s like giving someone directions to your house, and you actually want them to arrive. It?s like you tell them if you see the gas station on the left, you?ve gone too far.?

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Excerpt from ?Blood, Bones & Baked Eggplant?

Hardly anyone is as lucky as I am. All the women I know feel oppressed by, judged by, or in competition with their mothers-in-law. Not me. I bask in her.Even now at 86 years old, she still stands at the kitchen table and works the dough. She still keeps the tablecloths crisp and ironed. She still makes the baked eggplant in two batches, one large pan for everybody and one small pan left to the side for Giovanni, who doesn?t like mozzarella. And still, she determinedly boils all the vegetables into sweet submission and then douses them, once cooked, in her own olive oil. She continues to drink wine with her meals and coffee in the morning and still begrudges that they won?t let her drive anymore. Married to Michele or not, I still adore her.And I?d lost her.I choked on it at the airport the first summer of our all-but-the-signed-paperwork divorce, gulping down the sobs as my little guys walked through the security checkpoint toward Italian summer vacation with the man who was now ?their father? and no longer ?my husband.? It is not that my relationship with Alda is so intimate. It?s not that we get together in the kitchen and start prattling on, subject after subject, deepening our regard for each other through lengthy conversation while we prepare the meals. But still, in that house, in Alda?s house, in Alda herself, the promise of family as I had always wanted and imagined it, lives strong.

To reach Jill Wendholt Silva, call 816-234-4347 or send email to jsilva@kcstar.com.

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