Perfectly bent

English muffins spread with parsley butter await big, fat, grilled Prune burgers. 

Ok, Prune. Ouf. I have really dug myself into a hole with this one because instead of writing about it piecemeal the way I’ve written about other cookbooks, I got to know Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune on the sly, cheating on whatever I was doing with the blog to cook a dish from Prune every now and then. I did a lot of this over the last year and in the process all my feelings about the book changed dramatically. When I first got my copy of the cookbook I hated it with the fiery passion of the disappointed fan. Now I think it’s a masterpiece. And now I have to explain why all at once. Ouch.

Prune is not easy to love and not easy to cook from. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Prune is a cookbook by Gabrielle Hamilton, a famous badass New York chef who runs a tiny, fetishized downtown restaurant. The book has no index, no introduction, and no headnotes. It is modeled on the massive recipe binder used at the restaurant and contains a multitude of scrawled, scolding notes from Hamilton as well as underlinings and fake stains.

The burgers -- made with beef and lamb -- were delicious. It looks like I didn't quite get that cheese melted.

The book isn't warm and friendly. It isn't charming. That's the point. You might well hate Prune, but the things you most hate about it are the very things that make it great.  It’s as if Hamilton looked at a sweet, pretty, puffy contemporary cookbook, read a few cloying headnotes, and said: No fucking way. Her book is tart, precise, bitchy, opinionated, uncompromising, personal, tight, and totally original. In my view, it was the best cookbook of 2014.

I love reading the recipes in Prune. They have a real voice and rhythm. (They also work, but more on that next time.) They can be funny. They can be sensual. Sometimes both in a very short space. Here's a segment from the recipe for sweetbreads (which I will never make):

"Thoroughly and neatly peel the membrane -- the thin, slippery, translucent 'skin' that encases the gland -- which will come off in a rather neat sheet. Trim off any waxy fat clusters which tend to cling to the underside of the gland, and gently tug out any egregious muddy brown veins. Try to pull out the tubular looking arteries as well. If you've made it this far and are not retching into a garbage can, leave the minor little capillaries intact in order not to have the lobe fall apart into nuggets. Portion into 4-ounce pieces, as possible.

Hamilton is wonderfully acerbic on the subject of organic produce, farmers' markets, and the like. From her Bloody Mary mix recipe:

"Be sure to inventory properly midweek to keep the house fully stocked so that we are not having to make Bloody Mary mix over the weekend with some crappy organic tomato juice or 'artisanal' 'small-batch' Worcestershire handshopped in an emergency at Whole Foods."

God forbid.

And here's a favorite passage of mine from the spaghetti carbonara recipe (which I have made and which is very good):

“Pay attention to the toothsomeness of the pasta -- don’t get lost in your timing and let this just boil away in the pickup until it is flabby and bloated and disgusting. . . . Ideally we want the strands slick with yellow, eggy egg yolk and smoky, salty, uriney pancetta fat, with all the granules of sweet, nutty grated parm clinging to the strands. You want to see the black pepper, taste the floralness of it, and feel the warm heat of it in the dish -- but don’t obliterate.” 

It looks tossed off and maybe even sloppy, but it's not. It's vivid. It's loose. It's great.

In the first episode of her run on the PBS series Mind of a Chef, Hamilton says that she’s a perfectionist, but that her idea of perfection is is different from others people’s. She says that she likes things “perfectly bent.” 

Prune is perfectly bent. 

Tomorrow: some food.