Cruor, Cartilage and Ghee

First, lemme just say this — WHAT was I thinking?! The name of the book is Blood, Bones and Butter. The author is Gabrielle Hamilton.

A) Didn’t the book's name clue me in, even just a teensy bit, that there’d be some vastly unsettling (for me) imagery?

B) Was the title not a spectacularly huge tip off that there’d be gory dead things inside those very pages?

C) Did I miss that this is the memoir, (not fiction, not pretend) of a chef and not a vegetarian one either?

a) Nope. I liked the title though I didn’t think on what it referred to. The words. the alliteration, appealed.

b) You’d think, wouldn’t you?

c)  yes, incredibly I didn’t catch this at all.

Considering my questionable, improvised and decidedly remote relationship with cooking, why in Bast’s name would I bother to buy the autobiography and musings of a culinary artisan?

A dear friend recommended it. Raved about Hamilton's writing style in fact. I suspect she imagined I'd investigate, read more about it on my own or perhaps, ya know, I'd actually read the rest of the damn title. Nope—bought it without checking to see if the subject matter was molto squicky for me.

For what it's worth, I surely did love Hamilton's wordsmithing, She reminds me a bit of Kevin Tudish with his intimate, we’re-all-friends-so-let-me-tell-you-a-story way of rolling things out.

I might've been just fine, dandy even. I may've enjoyed the hell out of Blood, Bones and Butter except,,,except I just couldn't get past all the lambs-readied-for-grillage talk.

I passed it on to my bud Cindy. Cindy, who's calmly prepared animals and fish from just after their sad death to dinner table debut.

In another life Cindy was surely a chef. I know she'll appreciate Hamilton's memoir. She won't be wincing, cringing and unsuccessfully passing over the nasty parts like me.

We went out to lunch recently. Her husband Giovanni ordered the twin lobsters. I had to put one of the table decorations between me and his plate. I swear, those poor, sad, dead black lobster eyes were staring at me — accusingly! Why, oh why, hadn’t I freed them? They could live on the porch with Gaston and Ghost Cat.

“unfiltered Camels, and box of watercolor paints (and artist’s paycheck)—from him we learned how to create beauty where none exists, how to be generous beyond our means, how to change a small corner of the world just by making a little dinner for a few friends. From him we learned how to make and give luminous parties.”

This entrancing, engaging bit leads into the scene that was my Waterloo. The spitting of the innocents.

There’s another excerpt in the Times that causes me to regret that I just can’t get past that silencing of the lambs (OK, they were already dead but only just!). Had she been writing about fixing eggplant bodies on a spit or fanning out an array of asparagus on the grill, I would’ve been fine. Really!

Here's an interesting column from Food & Wine, The Conscientious Carnivore: Understanding Animal Slaughter

Today's most ingredient-centric, locavore-ish cooks want a clearer understanding of where their meat comes from—and for some, that means entering the abattoir or hunting for food. Writer Kate Sekules explores the issue.

Go. Read, read!