My friend Maya was telling me about Blood, Bones & Butter:  The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a new memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton.  If you don’t know who she is (and I had no idea), Hamilton is the chef/owner of the popular East Village restaurant Prune.  While I love memoirs and like to read about food, I wasn’t initially convinced that this book would be my cup of tea (even though Maya has overall good taste, just FYI).  I’ve never eaten at Prune, and I’m kind of sick of chefs, wanna be chefs, and various food writers blathering on about how root vegetables, eating croissants in Paris and butchering pigs CHANGED THEIR LIVES.  But Maya convinced me the book wasn’t just about being a chef – it was also about the birth of a writer, and being a mom.  Those things appeal to me big time, so I read it.  I am now kind of girl crushin’ on Gabrielle Hamilton.   Here’s why:

You know those stories of working moms who do crazy things?  Like give a press conference about their company going public seconds after delivery triplets via c-section?  Um, I admit I have a tendency to be judgy about such behavior.  Hamilton finds herself in the position of scheduling her birth after two of her chefs quit while 39 weeks pregnant leaving her in a major lurch.  This is what she says:

“It’s possible that working that brunch egg shift at thirty-nine weeks pregnant is badass.  And also possible that biting the bullet and scheduling your own labor is badass.  Keeping your shit together in front of your crew, no matter what, is badass.  Maybe even driving out to IKEA to pick up thirty white china platters and get back by dinner service the day before you are going to give birth is badass.  But badass is the last thing I am interested in being.  Badass is a juvenile aspiration.

She goes on. . . .

“But at thirty-eight years old, hugely pregnant with my future tiny, pure, precious son, I don’t want anything to do with badass.  I want to be J. Crew catalogue clean.  I don’t want to be that woman who can – and did – get down on all fours and scrape the pancake batter off the oven door after having just cooked three hundred eggs with a near-constant monologue of fucking fuck of a fuck issuing from her lips.”

Okay.  Lesson learned here.  Not everyone who does badass crazy things pre/post birth actually is PROUD of doing said things.  Definitely noted.  Stop the judgment Paula!

At one point in the book she is invited to speak at a conference at the Culinary Institute of America called “Where Are the Women?” about the challenges of being a woman chef.  During the conference, a woman asks if it is possible to manage to have both a family and a career.  Hamilton listened to her colleagues give what she calls “crap answers” and thought about what she had to do just to get to the conference that day. . .  and how she left the house without seeing her two boys awake.  She goes on to think about how the physical demands of being a chef are actually a pretty good preparation for motherhood.  I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say the words “cannibalization” and “breastfeeding” came up in the same sentence.  But what really moved me was her honesty, which I can safely say I was spared until I was presented with an actual live baby.

“Days go very badly and there is never balance.  Everybody gets shorted, everybody gets hurt, and you, the mom, not the least.  But it does give you a leg up, I often think, because the restaurant family is a perfect starter family.  It’s such an accurate in-flight simulator that I have grown to feel sorry for anybody who enters parenthood and a domestic project without having first run a restaurant.  From the earliest stages of family life when you are pregnant and uncomfortable and not sleeping well at night, the parallels to running a restaurant are almost over-obvious and all of that work you’ve done on your feet all day, with back problems from lifting so much heavy stuff or standing in one place for so long, with sometimes no time to eat or even to pee, and not sleeping much at all because of your commitment to your restaurant will all feel incredibly familiar and doable.”

She talks about the joys of family life too, this woman is seriously crazy about her kids – but if was a relief to see that someone else found caring for a baby difficult.  I remember feeling like I was the only one who was overwhelmed and overwrought by the “joys of parenting.”  It’s clear reading Blood, Bones and Butter that Hamilton can write. . . and word on the street is she’s a pretty good cook too.  I think I’ll make a reservation at Prune.