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As she recalls it, she and her 17-year-old brother Simon were left, parentless and cashless, to their own devices. Telling the story of the party, Hamilton brings her family and her adolescent world into focus, only to let us know, in passing, that she remembers this party and its preparations so well only because it was the last moment before everything fell apart.īy the time Hamilton was 12, her parents had split up, her mom fleeing to Vermont, her dad working on failed shows ( Got Tu Go Disco!) and nearly broke.

The book begins We threw a party (and what else, really, does the staff of a restaurant do every night?), describing in loving and vivid detail the lamb roast her father orchestrated in the meadow behind their house every summer, in a voice that's funny, sharp, and profane. Hamilton, as she tells it in her memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, grew up during the early 70s in a sprawling, bohemian family in rural Pennsylvania, the Jersey border right across the river-five kids running wild, dad a set designer and scenic artist for trade shows and theaters, mom a perfectionist Frenchwoman who made her own cassoulet and served her bisteeya the proper Moroccan way, with olive-and-orange salad and sweet mint tea. There had to be a story there.Īnd there is, but not the one you'd might expect. They'd been on the bar menu since the place opened, and they never budged. But every time I walked in, my brain snagged on those sardines. Dinners there were brightly lit but festive, and whole sunny Sunday afternoons could float by in the wake of their justifiably famous Bloody Marys. When I lived in New York, quirky little Prune was a favorite restaurant of mine. But wait, sardines? Canned? Served with Triscuits and mustard? Radishes with butter and sea salt, grilled lamb sausages, smoky eggplant and flatbread: just the kind of snacks you might expect, ready to be paired with a glass of Champagne or an expertly made Negroni at the tiny bar of a French-inspired, chef-owned bistro like Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune in New York City.