The recipes in Prune, the book, are typical Hamilton. In the book, Hamilton recalls her childhood, growing up on a farm and next to the apron of her gentle, nurturing mother, who instilled in her girl the feral pleasures of food: bright, fresh peas in a bushel basket, wild mushrooms pulled from deep in the woods. That story, and many wonderful others, was first told in her ecstatically praised 2011 memoir, Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Prune gets its name from Hamilton's much-loved 15-year-old East Village bistro, which, in turn got its name from the nickname Hamilton received from her mother as a child. There, at the end, you realize, this is a warm kitchen, a strong kitchen, a proud kitchen, in which not a drop is wasted. In Hamilton's hands, these turn into feats of alchemy: zesty powders, smooth sauces, creamy soups. The chapter's name is a witty contradiction, as what the section actually does is offer ways to give second, sometimes even third, lives to kitchen scraps including, but not limited to: limp celery, wine dregs and tomato skins. At the tail end of Prune, the new cookbook by renowned New York chef Gabrielle Hamilton, there's a section called Garbage.
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