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.
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