Bood, Bones, and Butter

The success of “Blood, Bones, and Butter” is that chef and restaurateur Gabrielle Hamilton turns her “inadvertent education (as) a reluctant chef” into a memoire as much about food as it is about family dynamics and cultural criticism. That she does this with metaphors concocted as carefully as her handmade salad dressings leaves a pleasant finish on the palate.
The owner of the New York’s trendy though classic Prune, Hamilton has written regularly about food in such magazines as “Bon Appetite” and “Food & Wine.” She has also been anthologized in “Best Food Writing.” Her University of Michigan writing degree does her well in her first book as week.
Raised in the Delaware River valley of New Jersey, Hamilton came up in a house full of older siblings, with an artist father and a French mother who navigated a six burner stove like a practiced dancer. Her mother cooked rustic fare. “She instilled in us nothing but a total and unconditional pleasure in food and eating,” Hamilton says.
The petite blonde cut her restaurant teeth waiting tables at local eatery “Mothers,” before moving to New York and the cultural weight of cowboy chic at the Lone Star Café. Here she learned “working her (expletive) tables,” meant pocketing cash meant for the cash register, then splitting it with the bartender.
Once she learned her lesson, Hamilton embarked on the 1980s odyssey of cocaine and sleeping late. The lesson also soon landed her in jail.
Both ahead of and behind her peers, she eventually enrolled at Hampshire College, intent on regaining some semblance of middle class expectations. Her history kept nagging, however, so Hamilton returned to New York and restaurant work.
Soon came gigs in commercial catering kitchens, where she met plenty of “ever-interchangeable warm (bodies) in a rented chef coat who knew not one thing about what a homemade mayonnaise might be.” The scale of such operations showed Hamilton that what often passed as good food was nothing more than quickly concocted combinations of second-rate ingredients, dressed up with clever presentations. The sheer quantity of the expectations demanded such shortcuts.
Next came a four summers long stint at a Berkshire summer camp, where Hamilton served baked chicken and tater tots by the pan-full, but also insisted on local produce and dairy.
Of her mother-in-law, Hamilton says her eighty-year-old Italian mother-in-law “cooks eggplant that satisfies like meat, grows her own olives, peels apricots from her own trees, and sun dries tomatoes to make her own tomato paste.”
Hamilton makes a fine meal of "Blood, Bones, and Butter."

In Which Brief Stories Are Told

Ferris State University English professor Phillip Sterling believes Northern Michigan is not easily categorized. Sterling, an accomplished poet, has recently published a collection of short stories, many of which take place in this area.
The prevailing narrative thread in his book of short stories, “In Which Brief Tales Are Told,” is the uncertainty between what is known and what is suspected. In each of the fifteen stories, narrators, some omniscient, some confined, unravel details that often leave as many questions as they answer.
Published as part of the Made In Michigan Series from Wayne State University Press, “In Which Brief Stories Are Told,” demonstrates Sterling’s poetic tendencies in prose narratives. Case in point is “The Small Bridge.” In the span of six pages, Will and his future/ former wife Joy move from an early encounter raking leaves to marriage, then onto divorce, all the while imagining their daughter Artemis, and how the failed relationship reveals their most intimate feelings.
The raking, “no more than stench of death and decay,” serves as an appropriate metaphor for their failed relationship, made only less so by the wonder of their daughter. Here, Sterling’s narrative veers to the heart of the matter, as we learn, “What should be said instead is how little they knew of each other at this point in the story.”
In “An Account in Her Name,” Sterling’s narrative approach is more traditional. A middle-aged woman returns to Northern Michigan to meet a banker about a savings account her long missing sister kept. In the unfurling of events, readers learn that the sister, a teenage lifeguard and swimming instructor at a public beach in Beulah, left a legacy of not only mystery but also insight
Edie, the lifeguard gone AWOL, worked hard at their father’s restaurant, a place he buys in order to move his family north, to escape the sinister possibilities of the city. His family is slow to buy into his dream, though Edie works hard to keep up appearances.
In the span of a summer, Edie disappears while returning North from her studies at Kalamazoo College, unleashing events that bring down the dreams of those around her, including her parents and her sister. When the sister, the story’s narrator, conducts her banking, however, the mystery is at once renewed and reduced.