A Cookbook With Attitude, Plenty of It

Gabrielle Hamilton sets our reservations adrift. She inspires courage. Reading her cookbook, you may well consider frying up sardine spines, heads and tails attached, for a special treat. Or making a butter and ham sandwich drizzled with olive oil. Or figure how a suckling pig would fit into your oven. Or maybe just dress slices of ripe, raw tomato with melted butter.

Now some might draw the line at poring over a monkfish liver, tweezers at hand for extracting worms, but I would follow Hamilton almost everywhere else in this extraordinary and entertaining book. If you love fat, frugality and courage, also a vivid attitude about life and food, this cook and this book, “Prune,” are for you. 

And if her name is familiar, Hamilton’s the woman who wrote a hard-edged, bestselling memoir, “Blood, Bones & Butter,” about losing one family and then finding another. In the kitchen. 

In her teens, she was deserted by her parents and took off for New York City, where she tended bar, engaged in grand larceny and sucked up a lot of drugs. But she had limits on bad behavior.  Cooking at a summer camp, she exploded in rage and grief over her helpers’ wanton mayhem, ignoring instructions and drowning crates of sleeping lobsters. She quit, hoping the bear in the woods would go after the miscreants. 

Then, alone, Hamilton traveled the world, cooking wherever she landed, and came home to New York to buy a derelict, 30-seat wreck of an abandoned restaurant in the east Village. Prune is its name. It is also the name by which her mother would call her as a youngster, with affection. And it is, of course, the name on this thick book’s, bright pink cover.

This is an unusual cookbook, its pages appearing smeared with greasy prints and drippings. There’s no index. And Hamilton treats her readers like her staff: Stern and  expressive, she demands attention to detail and reverence for work and thrift and good technique.

Lesson I: Good food need not be complex. The first recipe in “Prune” is a bar snack: canned sardines with Triscuits, Dijon mustard and cornichons. In the recipe for shrimp toast she insists on Pepperidge Farm Original White Sandwich Bread. “Don’t use anything better,” she cautions. “No brioche. No pain de mie. We are not that kind of restaurant.”

And among the dinner small plates she lists bread heels and pan drippings from roasted chickens.

Lesson II: Temperature matters. The whites of deviled eggs should sit at room temperature before filling, otherwise they are unpleasantly rubbery.

And the Serrano ham served with ripe figs and toasted pistachios must be at room temperature. “If the Health Department comes,” she writes, “take the Serrano off the carving stand and throw in the oven.”

Lesson III:  Sometimes, dishes are “impossibly difficult,” as in the Breton Butter Cake, requiring four pages of text. 

The recipe involves a butter-saturated dough (the butter French, and from Normandy), layering with sugar and rolling out repeatedly between stints of refrigeration, and then finally, baking to caramelize the bottom without burning the top.

So some of “Prune” is for fascinating reading. And some is for adventuresome cooking, from plain butter sandwiches, to spectacular Pigeon with Parsley Vinaigrette and Seeded Toasts.

To Gabrielle Hamilton, food, like ripe tomato slices in butter, is as vital to life as breathing.