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PRUNE

Gabrielle Hamilton

From Gabrielle Hamilton—the bestselling author of Blood, Bones & Butter—comes her eagerly anticipated cookbook debut filled with signature recipes from her acclaimed New York City restaurant Prune.
A self-trained cook turned James Beard Award–winning chef, Gabrielle Hamilton opened Prune on New York’s Lower East Side fifteen years ago to great acclaim and lines down the block, both of which continue today. A deeply personal and gracious restaurant, in both menu and philosophy, Prune uses the elements of home cooking and elevates them in unexpected ways. The result is delicious food that satisfies on many levels. Highly original in concept, execution, look, and feel, the Prune cookbook is an inspired replica of the restaurant’s kitchen binders. It is written to Gabrielle’s cooks in her distinctive voice, with as much instruction, encouragement, information, and scolding as you would find if you actually came to work at Prune as a line cook. Intended for the home cook as well as the kitchen professional, the instructions offer a range of signals for cooks—a head’s up on when you have gone too far, things to watch out for that could trip you up, suggestions on how to traverse certain uncomfortable parts of the journey to ultimately help get you to the final destination, an amazing dish. Unconventional and honest, in both tone and content, this book is a welcome expression of the cookbook as we know it. Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. She received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, House Beautiful, and Food & Wine. She has also authored the 8-week Chef column in The New York Times, and her work has been anthologized in eight volumes of Best Food Writing. She has appeared on The Martha Stewart Show and the Food Network, among other TV and she has won a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef NYC. She currently lives in Manhattan with her two sons.
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Published 2014-11-01 by Random House

Comments

“Fresh, fascinating . . . entirely pleasurable . . . Since 1999, when the chef Gabrielle Hamilton put Triscuits and canned sardines on the first menu of her East Village bistro, Prune, she has nonchalantly broken countless rules of the food world. The rule that a successful restaurant must breed an empire. The rule that chefs who happen to be women should unconditionally support one another. The rule that great chefs don’t make great writers (with her memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter). And now, the rule that restaurant food has to be simplified and prettied up for home cooks in order to produce a useful, irresistible cookbook. . . . [Prune] is the closest thing to the bulging loose-leaf binder, stuck in a corner of almost every restaurant kitchen, ever to be printed and bound between cloth covers. (These happen to be a beautiful deep, dark magenta.)”

PRUNE debuts on the NYT list at #9!

One of the most brilliantly minimalist cookbooks in recent memory . . . at once conveys the thrill of restaurant cooking and the wisdom of the author, while making for a charged reading experience.