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 and 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 has always been an idiosyncratic restaurant, with no culinary mission — like Italian tradition with Brazilian flavor, or American comfort meets Pacific Rim — other than to serve what Ms. Hamilton likes to eat. So, in “Prune” the book, as in the dollhouse-size dining room, broiled grapefruit sit next to poached peaches with toasted almond cream, and Siberian manti share space with New York deli-style egg sandwiches.
It 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.) Additional notes from Ms. Hamilton in black Sharpie are scribbled on most pages; instructions appear to be written on masking tape and pasted in. Written as if it were a manual to the sous-chefs in her kitchen, the book is fresh, fascinating and, occasionally, maddening.
You will not be reminded at the beginning of a recipe to preheat the oven, but you will be reminded to save the tags from a box of clams for 90 days in case of a (highly unlikely) visit from the inspectors of the New York City Department of Health. Some not-so-basic cooking skills are taken for granted: cutting vegetables into mirepoix, lemons into supremes, and salami into batonnets.
There is no recipe index, no sweeping introduction explaining the chef’s vision and story arc, and few of the explanatory headnotes that make recipes approachable to novice or nervous cooks.
That said, the recipes are very clear and unusually specific — far from the “combine as usual and cook until done” shorthand used by many chefs — because, as is perfectly clear from the minutely detailed descriptions, warnings, admonitions and directions on every page, Ms. Hamilton is a kitchen control freak of epic proportions. To cook from this book is to succumb to her control, which, if you are a fan of her work, is entirely pleasurable.
For her Breton Butter Cake, for example, described as “impossibly difficult,” the instructions are broken down into 37 separate steps. But if you follow them minutely (as I did), you will have successfully made one of the earth’s most delicious sweets, a cake that combines the best elements of poundcake, croissants and salty caramel: “butter and sugar barely held together by flour.”
In her recipe for salt-packed beef tenderloin and a lemony fried-bread tomato salad, many small details (“roughing up” the parsley leaves between hands instead of chopping them, holding back on salt in the salad to complement the meat and using extra-virgin olive oil to make the croutons) all contribute to the precise balance of the dish.
(She reminds her cooks, “Good oil is rarely recommended for frying so don’t ever do this when you go on to work in a real restaurant, but here at Prune I really prefer the flavor it adds.”)
She is never fussy for the sake of it. Rarely are there more than two or three elements in a dish, and often one of them is the unexpected twist that makes Prune dishes memorable. To the classic combination of spring onions and romesco, for instance, she adds lime. To fennel and butter, trout roe. And she comes up with ideas that have nothing to do with time spent in culinary school and everything to do with creative artistry: green tomatoes cured with salt and sugar and sprinkled with fried pistachios; pumpkin cooked in ginger beer; razor clams with paprika butter and hominy.
And fortunately, partly because her restaurant’s work space is no larger than a suburban home kitchen, she is also an unapologetic user of shortcuts like blenders and food processors; boxed chicken stock, canned chickpeas and Pam cooking spray; and supermarket products like Thomas’ English muffins, Sacramento tomato juice (for the famous Bloody Mary menu), and Grape-Nuts cereal.
Ms. Hamilton is full of edicts and opinions, emphatically expressed but not always explained. Is there a reason that balsamic vinaigrette is forbidden, “always and forever”? Why is it so important that candied lemons be cold when served with peppermint-chocolate patties? What is so wrong about shaping ice cream into a quenelle? (“We don’t want to send that message.”)
Among cookbook authors, there are kitchen pals, like Ina Garten and Deborah Madison, who want you to find your own pleasures; and kitchen dictators like Ms. Hamilton, Suzanne Goin (who also believes in the one right way to make her food), and Marcella Hazan, who rarely explained anything except to say that it was the Italian way. At least Ms. Hamilton has a lodestar of pleasure, even for family meal, the rushed preshift dinner that in some kitchens is considered a chore to cook; in others, an honor.
“Finally,” she says at the end of the chapter devoted to the meal, “enjoy yourselves. If this isn’t one of the highlights of your day, you are in the wrong industry. To feed ourselves and each other is the name of the game and should bring you great, thundering pleasure.”