Higher Education, Gender, and Fresh Food

Book & Article Review:

Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

"Tasting Wisconsin: A Chef's Story" by Amy B. Trubek

    Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton and flipping through my copy of The Restaurants Book edited by David Beriss and David Sutton. There are a ton of chef memories and autobiographies on bookshelves around the world. From the few that I’ve read, it seems that many of these chefs have had to overcome some kind of intense feat, or traumatic event. Maybe that’s what makes their story interesting enough to market to the widest audience. Hamilton had an extremely tumultuous 20 or so years before opening her popular NYC restaurant, Prune. The sudden dissolve of her family, an intense drug addiction, random travels around the world on practically no money, attaining her MA in fiction writing... It seems like she’s checked off every box from a ‘how to live a dramatic life’ checklist.

One aspect that I really enjoyed about this book (and something I think my advisor intended me to take away from it) was how Hamilton was so reluctant to admit she was a chef. She seemed to avoid her passion for cooking for those 20 tumultuous years, but all throughout she was working for catering companies, diners, and other small scale cooking jobs. I almost have the opposite dilemma, since I’m heading to cooking school in September, but I love anthropology! Trying to balance 2 passions is really difficult, or simply not fully knowing what you truly want with your life. So I can totally understand her resistance to admitting her true passion for cooking. As for myself, I’m only 21, so I still have time to really figure it all out (hopefully with a combination of both!)

The issue of gender was another piece of Hamilton’s story that stuck out to me. At one point in her career (pretty recently actually) she was asked by the Culinary Institute of America to be on a panel of female chefs and answer questions from students regarding being a female in an apparently male dominant industry. Hamilton had mixed feelings about going to this event, since she never saw her gender as a hinderance towards her professional life. At the panel, most of the chefs were going on about female empowerment and how women were better than men at culinary arts, which to Hamilton (and myself) was extremely distasteful. Gender is a highly discussed topic in anthropology and I find the relations of gender with food, and with the culinary industry in general, fascinating. Researching gender and food is something I hope to accomplish myself, once I gain a better understanding of the food world anthropologically.

Another great part of Hamilton’s story is her use and support of fresh, simple ingredients. The use of local and really fresh ingredients is being supported by more and more chefs and restaurants everyday. One of the articles in The Restaurant Book, “Tasting Wisconsin” by Amy B. Trubek, focuses on a Wisconsin chef who really embraces local ingredients and traditions. The concept of cuisine du terroir is the basis for the WI restaurant, L’Etoile. Cuisine du terroir is the idea of using seasonal, and local ingredients as the focus of each dish. Through this, restaurants, such as L’Etoil and Prune, are able to carve out their own type of cuisine, not having to follow other guidelines. Gabrielle Hamilton uses fresh ingredients to combine and recreate food in her own fashion from her travels and experiences; Odessa Piper, or L’Etoile, uses local ingredients to highlight old traditions along with new ones. Both Hamilton and Piper are leaving their mark in the culinary, and now literature, world by making their own niche through the food they innovate. 

Hamilton and her book, Blood, Bones & Butter

-Holly

Sources:

Beriss, D., Sutton, D. The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat. Chapter 3: "Tasting Wisconsin: A Chef's Stroy" by Amy B. Trubek (35-43). New York: Berg. 2007. Print. 

Hamilton, G. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. New York: Random House. 2012. Print.

Photo Source: http://www.afterellen.com/people/2011/03/gabrielle-hamilton-the-lesbian-chef-who-is-married-to-a-man