Theirs was an unusual, not very happy, marriage, begun as a green-card lark. Gabrielle married Michele Fuortes, an Italian doctor a decade her senior who took her “on a motorcycle around Rome all night, very fast, and gave me a tour of his city in the dark with the fountains and piazzas and cathedrals and statues high high up of winged horses pulling chariots across the sky made even more luminous and more amazing because of their being lit in golden floods against the orange-scented black night, the oppressive heat of the day diminished, the throngs of summer tourists asleep in their hotels.” In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass.” There would be nothing tall on the plate, the portions would be generous, there would be no emulsions, no crab cocktail served in a martini glass with its claw hanging over the rim. “There would be no foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. When she later opened her successful 30-seat restaurant, Prune (the nickname by which her mother called her as a child) in New York’s East Village, it was that experience “o be picked up and fed, often by strangers, when you are in that state of fear and hunger, became the single most important and convincing food experience I came back to over and over.” Reluctantly, she looked up some of her mother’s relatives and learned the ways of small-town French living. In 1986, she departed on what was to be a “slow and meandering two-year trip around the whole world” with “a heavy backpack, a heavy sleeping bag, empty notebooks, and $1,200 in American Express Travelers cheques.” The money was soon gone, and she often starved.

Hamilton was thrilled that “they were paying me to read and write.” But she found academia too precious and pedantic for her taste. Accepted in the master’s program for fiction writing at the University of Michigan, Ms.

It was, and is, a rich, exciting life that included extensive experience in catering, working as a waitress and as a cook in a summer camp. And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start.” At 13, she lied about her age and got a job in a restaurant kitchen, where she “felt instantly at home and fell into peeling potatoes and scraping plates for the dishwasher like it was my own skin.

Blood bones and butter