Gabrielle Hamilton has the sort of life that memoirs are made for. Left to run wild by her dysfunctional boho parents at 13, she developed a taste for cooking, car theft, and cocaine. She took off for Manhattan at an age when most teens are just getting their driver's licenses, and after a long slog through the food-service industry she lucked into her own restaurant, transforming a rat-ravaged dump into a foodie destination where she turns out beautifully unfussy dishes with perfectionist finesse.
If only this book were so carefully fashioned. Blood, Bones & Butter can be frustrating, with nicely observed takes on food and restaurant life but too little on her own story. How does Hamilton spin such vivid imagery (the ''pig-urine stench of… pancetta,'' the way ''changing a diaper reminds me, every time, of trussing a chicken'') but fail to satisfyingly explain why she didn't see her mother for 20 years or how she and her husband had two kids without living together? There's also a lot of sloppy writing: Pointless repetition and samey sentences — does every line need an aside set off by dashes? — make for a choppy read. Still, those descriptions stick. Here's Hamilton on a French butcher shop: ''Pheasants in full stunning plumage hung for a few days until their necks finally gave out, and you could see, physically, a kind of perfect ripeness to the meat when it became tender enough to pleasurably chew, as if the earliest stages of rot itself were a cooking technique.'' Whatever this book's faults, you have to admire a writer who can make even decomposing meat sound tempting. B
