In the weekend Wall Street Journal, bestselling foodwriter Michael Ruhlman reviews Gabrielle Hamilton’s cooking memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Ruhlman prefaces his essay by saying the book “is not the usual ‘chef memoir’ in our era of sex-in-dry-storage and testosterone-fueled cooking tell-alls. It is instead a minutely observed, artfully structured, fluidly written account of how a tough, eccentric woman navigates her way through a wayward youth and New York kitchens to become a renowned chef and respected author—and still manages to be uncertain about it all.” Exactly how eccentric?

Ruhlman describes Hamilton’s childhood as “feral”—her home was built around the ruins of an old silk mill. She “somehow balances cocaine and stealing cars with Little League practice and an after-school job. By 17, she is in New York, befriended by deli owners and hookers and snorting up the money she makes waitressing at the Lone Star Café. The job ends when she is busted for stealing.”