Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  EVEN THOUGH I HAD NOTHING, in the traditional sense, to qualify me as a chef or a business owner, I had something convincing and compelling from my early twenties. From that era with the chicken, and my dad shouting at me from the back steps, and me wanting to sleep the long permanent sleep. I had something from that time.

  From all that sitting on the woodpile that aimless fall, imagining the death of everything from garden tomatoes to small animals to the mailman, that time when I loathed and despaired of the self I had become, whatever self that was, so hastily cobbled together in an emergency, I had something persuasive.

  Those gloomy thoughts at dusk with the cigarettes turned from thoughts of my own death, which I, an otherwise healthy and robust and well-mannered nineteen-year-old, couldn’t in good conscience accomplish, to significantly politer thoughts of disappearing, which I could. And soon, out of pragmatic consideration for others and a deeply ingrained adherence to good manners, I had planned my own clever death without actual death. I would leave, disappear, send an occasional postcard and be done with the whole dilemma. Good-bye world! Good-bye New Jersey! Good-bye Family, God, and Country! Hello Eurail Pass.

  My mother, still protractedly adjusting in Vermont, now dabbling in “women’s groups” and long herbal-tea-soaked conversations of “spirituality,” kindly sent a list of friends and family in France and their phone numbers, which I planned to tuck away and forget about. My father, now dating all sorts of ill-fitting but dazzling younger women, not only opened up his house for a farewell party to which I invited the whole crew from Mother’s, but he also offered to take on my student loan payments for as long as I was gone. Todd offered a bon-voyage professional-model Nikon camera with a powerful lens that must have cost a thousand dollars. And so equipped, I arrived at a youth hostel in Brugge from New Jersey on a one-way, $99 People’s Express ticket. It was January 1986. I had a heavy backpack, a heavy sleeping bag, empty notebooks, and $1,200 in American Express Travelers cheques. When my idea was formed on the woodpile that fall—a slow and meandering two-year trip around the whole world where I might be swallowed and digested and composted by the earth itself, with the sum of my existence rolled up into a backpack—I failed to account for the weather. It was the coldest winter Europe had seen in fifty years. Each day in January in 1986 was, I recall, below zero. My feet were frozen. My hands were frozen. I just wanted to stay inside the youth hostel and write down my dark thoughts.

  This youth hostel, the Bauhaus, was owned by two brothers who came in and out with cases of UHD milk and laundered fitted sheets, both of them tall, with strong features and unruly hair, and between them a cassette collection that included Pere Ubu, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, and Joy Division. The cozy little bar downstairs was pleasantly populated with a few travelers, mostly guys, mostly German and Australian. The girl behind the bar, Aimée, spoke a peculiar accented English that made it impossible to guess her origin, which I admired, and I immediately set about cultivating such an accent of my own. She was there each day and seemed helpful to the brothers in enforcing the rules that govern all accredited and certified youth hostels:

  Hostelers out by 10 a.m. each day.

  Hostelers may not reenter the hostel until after 4 p.m.

  Hostelers must be 18 or older.

  In the morning, there was an included breakfast of watery coffee, overly sweet cheese wrapped in tin foil packets, bread, and a few olives, over which you could not linger. Anxious about money, I ate the whole thing hungrily, unsure what else I would eat that day. Precisely at ten a.m., we were pushed out. I began to call it the “youth hostile.” After a couple of brutally long and frigid days wandering around the deserted city, early and easily reaching my fill of the famous but only-decent French fries, I circled back in the afternoons, sheepishly noting that it was barely three minutes past four o’clock. In the almost empty youth hostel, for the rest of the evening I sat alone in the little bar downstairs at the reception area and wrote in my notebooks as a few fellow winter travelers trickled in and sat intensely discussing a certain guest house in Rangoon, while the exquisitely detached girl still behind the bar poured their drinks and braided colored thread into bracelets. Every evening, I ordered glasses of red wine from Aimée and sunk into the comfort of every cassette she played, from Suzanne Vega to U2, as if something familiar, something from your own life, even if it was just the soundtrack of it, could warm all of your frozen bones.

  Amsterdam was what I had mapped out next that frigid winter, and I questioned whether it might be warmer or colder there, and if—taking into account the conversation the travelers around me were now having about bhang lassis in Trivandrum, and blotter acid in Goa on New Year’s Eve—if I even cared. Within five evenings I had already filled one of my notebooks with questions of my purpose as well as my stamina.

  Dead of winter is not the most wholesome time to backpack in Europe, and January in Amsterdam found me in a huge open dormitory room with only three other occupants, the other forty or so beds between theirs and mine empty. They’d been squirreled in there since October. The drugged-out girl and the two drugged-out boys—none of them native English speakers but all of them speaking to each other in English—were huddled together under one blanket on one bed at the alcove end of the room, near a trickle of brown water that was leaking from one of the two steam pipes that were intended to heat the room. The dormitory was as cold as outside but without the wind.

  The threesome were slowly, very slowly, talking to each other. They were blotto. The girl, Israeli, was trying to get some drugs from the guy, Swiss, but it wasn’t working out for her. She was too stoned to make a serious case, and he was too mean to not enjoy his small fleeting power—he had the dope; she wanted the dope. This wasn’t the harshest he-has-the-drugs-she-wants-the-drugs scene I had ever witnessed, but neither was it the most benign, and it was the first in which I would have to spend the night trying to sleep in the same room with the transaction unfurling a few beds away. The third guy, possibly a local, wanted what there was of the Israeli girl and wasn’t deterred, it seemed, by either her disinterest or the lack of privacy.

  Even though this was the one single city in the world where the guesthouses, it seemed, allowed you to stay indoors the day long through if you wished, pouring it all out into your journal, I had to get out. That little gruesome threesome in the one cot with their blunted senses was enough to drive me to wander the empty city of Amsterdam, even in subzero temperatures. Like everybody, I was curious about the legal hash and the legal prostitution, of course, but back in New Jersey when I had been thinking of including Amsterdam in my route, I also had thought I might wander the canals and see houseboats and Anne Frank’s house and tulip farms and spend a couple of days cycling around the city. I wanted to see if anybody wore the clogs, and if I could make it to the city of Gouda in a day trip to try the famous cheese where huge, round yellow wheels of the stuff are traded at the market like a commodity. I wanted to tip my head back and drop the new fatty herring down the hatch and drink beer from a tap. But it was just the wrong season for this kind of travel. In all my months of studying the atlas, and in my great victory in flying all the way to Europe for only $99, I totally had fucked up and arrived in the heart of the wrongest season. No bicycles, no clogs, and no herring.

  After trudging around for hours, while the tall, good-looking, and sensually emancipated Dutch retreated inside their homes and kept warm, I wandered into a coffee shop—the Dutch kind with legal drugs for sale—anxiously calculating my money, already down to $1,000 from the $1,200 I’d started out with only a week before, and regretting the wastefulness of now having a few useless Belgian francs in my pouch, but determined to have a Dutch experience. I felt jittery from caffeine, from hardly letting myself descend into full unguarded sleep all of the nights before, and from a chill so permeating now made more deep by the dampness of canals and seawater. I stood for a long time staring up at the blackboard menu of drugs available and finally decided to try the space
cake, but the blond girl at the dealer’s counter and the fact of her heavily applied silver eyeliner somehow suddenly made me feel unsafe. Someone at a little table had passed out from the force of whatever she’d sold him—he was slumped over and fully blacked out—and I found myself unable to go through with it. Of all the times I’ve needed to be fully in possession of my wits, here and now, totally alone in the world with my whole existence crammed into my pockets, was the most urgent of all. I backed out into the cold street, starting to really unravel and nearly defeated.

  Several blocks later, I found a café—the European kind with coffee and snacks—and went in it to warm up and to sort out some of my anxieties. I ordered a sandwich and sat in the grip of my own fuckup—impossible to go back home, impossible to wander another frozen minute in another impenetrable city, impossible to last much longer on my dwindling traveler’s checks and impossible to go straight to balmy, exotic and indecipherable Indonesia until I’d gotten some more experience as a lone female traveler in friendly western recognizable Europe—until the waitress put the plate in front of me. There was, as I’d ordered, a cold ham sandwich on good buttered grainy bread, but it came with a warm salted potato and a wedge of Gouda that had aged so much that it had gritty, very pleasant granules in it, which at first I thought were salt grains but then realized were crystallized calcium deposits from the milk of the cheese. I ate the little potato right away. Its pale yellow flesh was perfectly waxy, and its skin snapped when I bit into it. I don’t know under what other conditions a simple, salted, warm boiled potato could ever taste as good as this tasted. Probably none.

  Usually the food that meets your hunger sends you into a calmed and expansive state of deep satisfaction, but I instead sat in that café and became quite heavy and defeated. Yes, I had wanted to leave everything behind—I had grown to hate my country, my culture, my own first and last name—but the sharp and creamy cheese, the starchy, warm small potato, somehow made it starkly apparent how weary and lonely and physically uncomfortable one could become in exile. I had fantasized I would be gazing at the Van Goghs while my bicycle with the basket rested outside against a lamppost, unlocked. But instead I had just seen some guy in a coffeehouse fully blacked out at the table. I was about to return to three drugged-out and frightfully skinny roommates.

  I needed a better plan. Slowly savoring the last bites of my ham sandwich on that corky pumpernickel bread, I pored over my travel notes and found the letter from my mom with the list of her relatives and friends in France. There was also a contact in Algeria—the family of one of the dishwashers from Mother’s—but when I imagined trying to manage that phone call, shouting over the static from an international booth at the post office, our words overlapping in the delay, and trying to cheerfully introduce myself while asking if I could be their guest for, well, several weeks, I immediately opted for France. I would be welcome there.

  Marie Nöelle had a crêperie, tabac, and bar des sports in the tiny town of Montauban-de-Bretagne. I was silently thrilled to get off the train and, not one other backpacker or drug addict in sight, be met by this luminously blue-eyed old friend of my mother’s.

  “Gabrielle!” she waved.

  “Marino! Salut!” And we were off, my heavy pack in the back of the Volkswagen Rabbit and she, as if I were her peer, began to speak of everything—complex and troubling, simple and pleasing—that had arrived in her life these past many years since we had seen each other. We drove through small villages on our way from Rennes to Montauban, and pulled up finally to her little spot in the center of town. The bar was closed, on a Sunday evening, and so we went without interruption upstairs to her apartment and settled me into the attic room.

  While I unpacked a little and arranged my things, Marie Nöelle put together a simple dinner of soup and cheese and brought it up to her room on the second floor, where she said she preferred to eat in the winter when it got dark so early and the nights were so very long. Her husband of a few years had just months before killed himself by mouthing a hunting gun and pulling the trigger—right in front of her.

  I slept more that night than I had in thirty days combined, it seemed, relieved beyond description to not have to keep nocturnal watch over my traveler’s checks and my passport and my expensive camera, which all of the winter drug addicts in every youth hostel I slept in would have razored out of the bottom of my sleeping bag while I slept had I not remained, even in sleep, alert. When I came down to the bar to find Marie Nöelle, the place was open and busy, and there was the smell of coffee being ground each time an au lait was ordered. The room was warm and simple, with a stand-up bar, a small area at the cash register for lottery tickets and cigarettes, and a separate area with a pool table and a table soccer game up a few steps in the back. The crêperie, with its heavy, black cast-iron griddles and just a few tables, was in another room open and adjacent to the bar.

  She put me to work at the bar at first, pulling espresso and steaming milk. She introduced me to one of the stout and ruddy-complexioned farmers and as we shook hands, his rough and calloused clasping mine, I said, “Bonjour, Roger.” And Roger bowed slightly and said, “Enchanté, Mademoiselle,” revealing his brown teeth. Marie Nöelle taught me how to pour his little ballon of vin rouge ordinaire with a good splash of water in it, because at eight-thirty in the morning, he and all of the other blue-clad men with terrible teeth who now stood against the bar, with manure and red dirt stuck to their black rubber boots, were on their first of many to follow. Throughout the day they would stop back in for “un coup” while their tractors sat haphazardly parked on the side of the road just outside. Bottles of Pernod, Ricard, and my favorite, the bitter orange-flavored Suze, hung upside down from a clever rack, and I learned to push the glass up against the spring-fitted nozzle to drain out a perfect one-ounce pour.

  The eggs sat out at room temperature in the kitchen and Michel, the crêperie cook who wore big thick-lensed glasses that made his eyes huge above his mustache, let the cigarette dangle from his lips as he cracked them into the crêpe batter, made of buckwheat flour each day. The salad dressing was made in the bottom of the bowl with garlic, mustard, vinegar, and oil and tossed in with the Bibb lettuce that we bought at the little open air market that set up every morning across the street.

  I stood often with Marino at her post at the cash register and sold lottery tickets, Gitanes, Gauloise, and Rothman Rouge by the carton, and from the register I could look straight into the crêperie where Michel spooned out the batter onto the oversized black turntable griddle and then swirled his little dowel of a baton around like a dj scratching the beat. He was decisive and swift, and he cracked the egg right onto the galette and sprinkled the grated Gruyère and laid out a slice of that jambon with the white fat cap over and over again, working the two griddles effortlessly. To finish and plate each galette, he used his metal spatula to fold in the four sides, forming a square from a circle with the contents exposed still at the center, and deftly ran the spatula under the savory crêpe, delivering it to the plate. “E voilà!” he said each time, and then turned to the next. That meal—with the salad right on top of the complet, and a bottle of the hard cider kept at truly cellar temperature in an actual cellar—was one I ate every day without ever getting bored with it. I had never before given a single thought to how different the lettuces and the cider and even the butter, bread, and eggs tasted when left at room temperature and never refrigerated, but now I was keenly aware of it.

  For the duration of the winter I hibernated inside her warm little hub of life in that tiny village and earned a few francs by working every day in the bar or the crêperie or at the cash register selling cigarettes and lottery tickets. I fixated on the local shops—the boulangerie, poissonnerie, boucherie, fromagerie, and pâtisserie—and how they displayed their foods in that careful, precise, and focused way that never, in spite of all that precision and care, looked rigid or antiseptic or strained. Every piece of food in every store—no matter how artful, precise, and oft
en jewel-like—begged to be touched, smelled, and heartily eaten. We bought bread at the bread store, meat at the meat store, dry goods at the dry goods store. There was a huge supermarket that had just been built at the edges of the town, but when we went there—to get something in bulk supply for the bar or crêperie—Marie Nöelle kind of smiled sheepishly and moved quickly across the parking lot to the car.

  In town at the local boucherie, though, the rabbits and pheasants and geese were displayed in the cases with some remnant of their living life still with them. The geese were laid out with their long necks arranged in great question mark arcs around their totally plucked bodies as if they were not dead but simply deep in sleep, their black beaks and faces nestled in striking contrast to their bare creamy bodies. The rabbits looked like clipped show poodles, wearing fuzzy slippers, otherwise skinned, but their furry feet left intact while their little bloody faces revealed their tiny bloody teeth. 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 stage of rot itself was a cooking technique. Boudin blanc and boudin noir overran the charcuterie and traiteur cases as Christmas and New Year and saint’s days in the deep of winter demanded these traditional foods, made only at this time of year when animals are slaughtered not bred.