Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 641.3437 HAM | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From Gabrielle Hamilton, bestselling author of Blood, Bones & Butter, comes her eagerly anticipated cookbook debut filled with signature recipes from her celebrated New York City restaurant Prune.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE SEASON BY
Time * O: The Oprah Magazine * Bon Appétit * Eater
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. The recipes have been tried, tasted, and tested dozens if not hundreds of times. 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.
Complete with more than with more than 250 recipes and 250 color photographs, home cooks will find Prune's most requested recipes--Grilled Head-on Shrimp with Anchovy Butter, Bread Heels and Pan Drippings Salad, Tongue and Octopus with Salsa Verde and Mimosa'd Egg, Roasted Capon on Garlic Crouton, Prune's famous Bloody Mary (and all 10 variations). Plus, among other items, a chapter entitled "Garbage"--smart ways to repurpose foods that might have hit the garbage or stockpot in other restaurant kitchens but are turned into appetizing bites and notions at Prune.
Featured here are the recipes, approach, philosophy, evolution, and nuances that make them distinctively Prune's. Unconventional and honest, in both tone and content, this book is a welcome expression of the cookbook as we know it.
Praise for Prune
"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.)" -- The New York Times
"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." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Author Notes
Gabrielle Hamilton received an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, Bon Appétit, Saveur, House Beautiful, and Food & Wine. She also wrote the 8-week Chef column in The New York Times. She is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York's East Village. She won a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef NYC. She is the author of Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef and Prune.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This is one of the most brilliantly minimalist cookbooks in recent memory: no preface, no introduction, no interminable recounting of all that Hamilton has witnessed in her 15 years as the chef/owner of New York's Prune restaurant. Instead, nested throughout the 250 recipes, in a handwritten font, are scribblings, usually in the form of orders rather than suggestions, as if the reader were on her payroll. It's an appealing tactic, in a masochistic kind of way, which at once conveys the thrill of restaurant cooking and the wisdom of the author, while making for a charged reading experience. "Don't just slam them into the pan and manhandle," she advises in a recipe for razor clams with smoked paprika butter. Her carrot-peeling advice is equally blunt: "Long fluid strokes please-do not chisel away at them into a cubist rendering." At the end of an entry for salt and sugar-cured green tomatoes, she challenges the imagination by planting a suggestion, like any good boss would, "We should figure out something to do with the interesting cured tomato water.... Maybe the bartenders have an idea?" Twelve of the book's 13 chapters are jammed with intensely flavored entries. The other, entitled "Garbage," finds purpose for limp celery and smoked fish scraps, of which the author warns, "I'll kill you if you waste it." Perhaps a little fear is warranted after all. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Chef at New York City's Prune, Hamilton has reaped kudos for her inventive and deeply satisfying cooking. Long queues form in the East Village on Sunday mornings for her brunch. The myriad recipes that underlie Prune's menus appear in these pages. They are not much designed for the home cook but are meant for professional chefs: instructions include such directions as Don't let this sit in the pass and plating directives. She even explains how waiters should pronounce certain dishes. Recipes range from a complex cold pork with tuna sauce to a simple butter-and-sugar sandwich. There's also a grand section on the family meal, the daily repast served to staff before the restaurant opens to the public, some recipes demonstrating how to use kitchen oddments to advantage for that service. Despite the book's address to fellow restaurateurs, skilled home chefs can find a number of ways to profit from a fair number of Hamilton's creations.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER MOUNTAIN of cookbooks. But as always, they can be divided into two piles: for actual, and for aspirational, forays into the kitchen. Here are some of the best of both. Cal Peternell, long the chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, started writing TWELVE RECIPES (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99) for his son, who was leaving home for the first time. Peternell confesses that he had been too casual, assuming that learning to cook could be "effortlessly communicated and instinctively absorbed." To remedy that situation, earnest lessons began. "A crash course in cooking for yourself and others also goes by another name: It's called dinner." The result is the best beginner's cookbook of the year, if not the decade. In addition to being warm, funny and smart, "Twelve Recipes" will actually teach you to cook. If you already have an understanding of the basics, there are plenty of cookbooks out there, but if you've never chopped an onion, the going will be rough. Peternell begins, seemingly inauspiciously, with toast, but by the chapter's end you'll understand how he can nudge anyone, from novice to expert, to want to be a better cook, a better host, a better shopper, even a better person. The dishes get steadily more robust, and Peternell never loses sight of the goal. Chickens will be roasted, pasta will be boiled, beans will be soaked and dinner will be made. His wit and intelligence are apparent throughout: "Adding a chopped hard-boiled egg to salsa verde for the first time is a little epiphany, one of those moments when you can feel it all coming together with an almost audible crack. Be ready for it." The other strategy for teaching people to cook is to teach them to cook lots of things. In Mark Bittman's HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING FAST (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35), as the title suggests, the New York Times food writer and columnist takes up the old idea that we would cook more if our culinary efforts didn't take so long. Irma Rombauer (of "Joy of Cooking" fame) published her version, "Streamlined Cooking," in 1939, and many of the add-a-can-of-soup recipes we're only just shaking off trace their roots back to her. Bittman sees no need to sacrifice quality for speed, and of course he's right. His book is clear, concise and designed for maximum efficiency. While learning to cook from recipes is inherently flawed, there seems to be no other way to learn to bake. It's unforgiving and scientific - and what it yields is, for most of us, just as surprising as a chemistry experiment. Which is not to say that all baking is complicated. Dorie Greenspan, in BAKING CHEZ MOI (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), presents a collection of recipes that, as she explains, "have nothing to do with fancy techniques and even fancier frills. .. . They're plain and homey." And her apple pielettes are precisely that. Greenspan's instructions are both approachable and adaptable: "If you have little pie pans, you can use them for this recipe (you might get fewer than a dozen), but my pan of choice here is a muffin tin." Those looking for a dessert that's almost impossible to flub will want to add her pistachio and berry gratins to their repertoire. Keep going through the olive-oil-and-wine cookies and the cakes (simple and fancy), learn to make your lemon madeleines rise into the little bump Greenspan terms "the holy grail of madeleine bakers," and you'll have taken a tremendous step forward. Perhaps you want to cook lots of things, but only from one place? Margarita Carrillo Arronte adds to Phaidon's list of comprehensive national cookbooks ("The Silver Spoon" being the indispensable Italian one), with MEXICO (Phaidon, $49.95). Just over 700 pages long, jammed full of recipes, each accredited to its particular region, it's a work of staggering breadth, but it's also a pleasure to read, with recipes ranging far from enchiladas suizas. Maybe too far: Pachuquilla-style ant eggs calls for six cups of fresh ant eggs. I'm still hoping that "ant egg" is a metaphor for something. Mark and Talia Kurlansky's INTERNATIONAL NIGHT (Bloomsbury, $29) began as a family game, reminiscent of something Wes Anderson's Tenenbaums would recall when thinking about their halcyon days, before all the trouble started. Once a week, Kurlansky and his daughter, Talia, would spin a globe and wherever her finger landed became Friday night's dinner. Talia would introduce each meal with various hints, and her mom was tasked with guessing the country. The Kurlanskys appear to be a family of overachievers, a suspicion only heightened when you hit passages like this: "I already knew a few Moroccan dishes, especially since I had studied cooking in neighboring Tunisia. But when I learned that for the first time in history there was a cooking school in Morocco, I decided that Talia and I had to go there." The Kurlanskys' recipes vary in difficulty, and every night is accompanied by a Kurlanskyopedia entry, if you will, about the place. I don't think I'll ever make the soup called oyster zousui, but I liked reading about the Japanese distrust of that raw mollusk, and it was nice to find, between the same covers, good recipes for Afghan chick-pea meatballs, Sauerbraten and Mongolian hot pot. Overachieving at home can come in a few flavors. The dishes in Marcus Samuelsson's MARCUS OFF DUTY (Rux Martin/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35) range from kid-friendly fish sticks to suckling pig, and while at first the recipes seem somewhat chef-ed up (six tablespoons of white miso in the egg wash for the fish sticks?) the techniques aren't anything that would stretch the occupant of a home kitchen, and they're more straightforward than the ingredient list might imply. This playful, funky book, written with Roy Finamore, is full of photos of smiling people and insightful sticky-note-esque asides. Far from the noisy, rambunctious family life touted in "Marcus Off Duty" is the staid still life with flower petals and eggs that makes up SUNDAY SUPPERS (Clarkson Potter, $32.50), derived from Karen Mordechai's Brooklyn-based food blog. Strange missteps abound - if you want beans in your chili, that's O.K. with me, just don't say it's "Tex- as style." In a section called "Camping," Mordechai tells us that "we built a fire near our friend's cabin in Oregon. . . . close enough to a kitchen to walk a few items over" - which explains the presence of cast-iron skillets and pictures of people in nice wool overcoats. But I did come away from the book with a recipe for tea-and-ginger-cured sea bass to layer on homemade bagels. And the desire to put confetti inside clear balloons and float them around my next party. The book also makes me want to have a party. Another food blogger with very good clothes, perfect light and enviable settings has made the move to hardcovers: Malin Elmlid has traveled the world bartering bread, and what she found is displayed in the photographs and recipes in THE BREAD EXCHANGE (Chronicle, $35). If you bake bread at all seriously, it's difficult to adapt entirely to another person's technique, but I wouldn't be surprised to find Elmlid's readers popping a teaspoon of edible charcoal powder into their dough - because the black loaves she creates are stunning. Elmlid also records the dinners she eats along the way, and gives us fetching meanders through Warsaw (buttermilk soup with horseradish mashed potatoes), Stockholm (crayfish), Bavaria (elderberry compote) and California (vegan banana bread). The gorgeous photographs in APPLES OF UNCOMMON CHARACTER (Bloomsbury, $35), by Rowan Jacobsen, have no beautiful people and no intriguing locales. They have only one thing: apples. Every variety is accompanied by notes on its origin, appearance, flavor, texture, season, use and region. Lest this sound underwhelming, consider Jacobsen's description of the Orleans Reinette, with flavors of "rum punch, heavy on the lime and nutmeg." And that's only the beginning: "Its coarse white flesh is hard and crunchy, just juicy enough to get the job done. The skin, quite chewy and persistent, sticks around interminably. Peel it." All this, plus recipes! (My favorites are grilled apples with smoked trout, fennel and lemon zest; and the duck and apple risotto with bacon, sage and forest mushrooms.) Apples are perhaps the world's friendliest food - a far cry from the next installment in Jennifer McLagan's project to write books about things that scare people. Now the author of "Bones," "Fat" and "Odd Bits" has taken on what she calls the "world's most dangerous flavor," BITTER (Ten Speed, $29.99). It's the one that separates the children from the adults, more than metaphorically: Infants, whose taste buds are all there and functioning, find bitter overwhelming. And since the flavor is a built-in warning that what we're eating might be poisonous, babies will spit out bitter foods. Learning to appreciate bitter comes with sophistication (and deadened taste buds - which, if you think about it, calls into question the implied brag of "acquired tastes"). McLagan's book strikes the perfect balance between essayistic exploration, lush photography and recipes. Come spring, I'll be frying her dandelion potato rösti in duck fat, and you can be sure I'll never again omit a sachet of crushed coriander seeds when I steam mussels in beer. One of the most influential bars in America has come out with a book of cocktails. David Kaplan, Nick Fauchald and Alex Day's DEATH & CO. (Ten Speed, $40), from the bar of the same name, is just as brilliant as the place itself. Sections on "Ice" and "The Death & Co. lexicon" (the family meal is "a staff-wide shot taken nightly around 11:30 p.m. . . . Also known as 'time to feed the kids'") will appeal to cocktail aficionados. The recipes are well organized and will appeal to everyone. Not to be skipped is the section on evaluating cocktails: Making daiquiris Nos. 1,2 and 3 (too sweet, too tart, just right) is an education in the difference a quarter of an ounce can make. If you're such a serious drinks person that you bought the Death & Co. book the day it came out, get back down to the store and pick up Dave Arnold's liquid intelligence (Norton, $35). This is cocktail science. Every drink comes with a breakdown; the strawberry bandito, for instance, is a "4 3/5-ounce (140 ml.) drink at 17.1 percent alcohol by volume, 9.0 grams/100 ml. sugar, 0.96 percent acid." Fantastic experiments with red-hot pokers and nitrogen abound, and if you've ever wanted your grapefruit juice to be clear, this is the book for you. I'm reasonably sure that when the mastermind behind the Booker & Dax cocktail bar writes "Why clarify? Why breathe?" he's poking a little fun at himself, but I wouldn't fay any money on it. Of course, every season comes with a bevy of new art books attached to chefs. They are, without exception, beautiful, and the food is exceptional too - and yet they still blur together. Another restaurant, another chef, some more food polished to the nth degree. But some of them do stand out. The photos of record albums, paintings and even fish in Massimo Bottura's never TRUST A SKINNY ITALIAN CHEF (Phaidon, $59.95) demonstrate that food has indeed morphed into an element of high culture. The recipes are preceded by essays, always with a wink ("Guineau Fowl, Not Roasted"). Only the bravest will stand at the cutting board with this book, but I might have the courage to make the striking dish of black katsuboushi broth and cod cooked on charcoal until the fish's skin is also black. Ed Anderson's pictures in Charles Phan and Janny Hu's THE SLANTED DOOR (Ten Speed, $40) are so good they make you hungry. Luckily, the recipes from Phan's much loved San Francisco restaurant are right next to them. The crispy rice cakes gave me a new reason to dust off the ebelskiver pan (they were eaten as fast as they could be made), and I'm glad to have the recipe for the filibuster cocktail. Phan's dishes are remarkably translatable to home cooking. Of roasted lobster with butter-herb dressing, he notes: "Lobster is actually quite easy to prepare, and if you have all the ingredients sliced and diced ahead of time, it needs just 15 to 20 minutes in the oven before you serve it to guests. I'm pretty sure they'll be wowed." Fans of Gabrielle Hamilton seem to have waited as long for PRUNE (Random House, $45) as they do for a seat at brunch. The book is a journey inside the restaurant, constructed as if it were the notebook a new hire would have to master. But those kitchen binders tend to be full of jargon and short on instruction, so at times the construct feels forced. (What good are directions like "Save wishbones for birthdays"?) The style can feel a little relentless, what with directions like "Shower with parsley, freshly chopped, at pass." (The pass in my house is the table, after all.) But what Hamilton has done, and done well, is invite us in. And if you want to learn the kitchen logic of Prune, it's here. Do we need a recipe for egg on a roll, N.Y.C. deli style? Actually, much of the country does, and Hamilton's admonition not to "gourmet-up this item with homemade rolls or rolls from Whole Foods" is spot on. Sometimes, though, the instructions feel out of place. I'm very happy to have the recipe for mackerel escabeche, sliced sweet capicola, buttered rye crackers and celery leaves, but I don't need the final instruction to "reuse marinade, but pay attention to viability and date. ... Do not send this down the drain. It clogs the grease trap. Discard into the dirty fat drum in the garbage area, please." From London, Daniel Doherty has sent us DUCK AND WAFFLE (Mitchell Beazley, $34.99), full of bold recipes from this 24-hour restaurant. The book moves through the whole day, starting with breakfast (hangover pizza: "This is so wrong, my wife would kill me. But anyway, the cure begins____" ) and ending with late-night snacks (the tricky but delicious bacon jam steamed buns). The house breads, which can be cooked like naan on a grill pan, are excellent. There's a rough and tumble charm throughout, coupled with flashes of brilliance: You can bet I've been soaking an oyster shell in Noilly Prat to make "sea spray" vermouth as invented by Richard Woods. Just as you can bet that I'll return to the all-purpose pickling liquid in George Mendes and Genevieve Ko's MY PORTUGAL (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $35). Mendes's crispy pigs' ears with ramps and cumin yogurt were just as good with scallions, and every time I want to taste Portugal, I'll make his pork belly with clams and pickles. Whenever I can't think of anything to do with a vegetable, I'll return just as quickly to Yotam Ottolenghi's PLENTY MORE (Ten Speed, $35), for his wide-ranging selections and for simple, clever techniques like smoking beets in a tent of aluminum foil in a wok. The blue ribbon chef cookbook of the year, without a doubt, is Sean Brock's HERITAGE (Artisan, $40). Just when we thought Southern food had been done until it was as limp as the green beans at the crummiest soul food restaurant, Brock has pushed and elevated the cuisine. Even the simplest cornbread is brought to new heights. Sometimes a cookbook changes the way you think about food you thought you understood, and this is one of those books. Grits, around here, will be pre-soaked from now on. I'll make roux with cornmeal and bacon fat for Brock's tomato gravy as often as I can, and the same goes for his ramp- and crab-stuffed hush puppies. It takes months to make his fermented hot sauce, but I have faith that it'll be worth the wait. ON THE WEB Still in need of inspiration? Consult our annotated list of 20 cookbooks at nytimes.com/books. MAX WATMAN'S most recent book is "Harvest: Field Notes From a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food."
Library Journal Review
Acclaimed chef Hamilton (Blood, Bones, & Butter) illuminates the differences between home and restaurant cooking with these 250 succulent dishes from Prune, her restaurant in New York City's East Village. The recipe for roasted capon on garlic croutons, for instance, yields eight to 16 "orders," calls for such professional tools as a hotel pan and walk-in refrigerator and tells readers what to do if they're running behind during a restaurant service. Other recipes, rife with chef lingo and candid advice on everything from how to extend the life of costly ingredients to how to avoid angering the Health Department, are entertaining to read but onerous. Still, simpler offerings (e.g., sour cream and toasted caraway omelette, canned sardines with Triscuits, Dijon mustard, and cornichons) will tempt home cooks. VERDICT Like Suzanne Goin's The A.O.C. Cookbook and April Bloomfield's A Girl and Her Pig, this unique cookbook highlights the personality and creative process of a top female chef. Highly recommended for would-be restaurant professionals. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Bar Snacks Canned Sardines with Triscuits, Dijon Mustard, and Cornichons 1 can sardines in oil 1 dollop Dijon mustard small handful cornichons small handful Triscuit crackers 1 parsley branch Only Ruby brand--boneless and skinless in oil-- from Morocco. Buckle the can after you open it to make it easier to lift the sardines out of the oil without breaking them. Stack the sardines on the plate the same way they looked in the can--more or less. Don't crisscross or zigzag or otherwise make "restauranty." Commit to the full stem of parsley, not just the leaf. Chewing the stems freshens the breath. Radishes with Sweet Butter and Kosher Salt red globe or French breakfast radishes, well washed to remove any sand, but left whole with a few stems intact unsalted butter, waxy and cool but not cold kosher salt There is nothing to this, but still . . . I have seen it go out looking less than stellar--and that's embarrassing considering it's been on the menu since we opened and is kind of "signature," if Prune had such a thing as signature dishes. Keep the radishes fresh with ice and clean kitchen towels. Cull out any overgrown, cottony, spongy radishes; keep your butter at the perfect temperature; and be graceful on the plate, please. Garrotxa with Buttered Brown Bread and Salted Red Onion peeled red onion, halved and thinly sliced into ribbons kosher salt brown bread unsalted butter, cool but softened for spreading Garrotxa from Spain extra virgin olive oil freshly ground black pepper thyme Liberally salt the red onion and toss with your fingers to break up the ribs. Let sit 10 minutes to weep out some of their bite. Spread bread with a generous amount of butter, wall to wall. Cut bread in triangles and arrange on plate. Lay slices of cheese next to bread. Heap a generous tangle of salted onion on the plate. Drizzle whole thing--cheese, buttered bread, and onion--with EVOO just before selling. Be light-handed with the oil--3 fats on one plate makes sense here but it's about flavor and texture, not about ostentatious macho eating. Keep it accurate. One grind black pepper and branch of thyme to finish Marinated White Anchovies with Shaved Celery and Marcona Almonds Per plate: 1 scant cup thinly sliced, sweet, tender inner branches of celery, leaves left whole 1 short dozen marinated white anchovies ¼ cup Marcona almonds good drizzle extra virgin olive oil brief squeeze lemon juice lemon cheek few grinds black pepper big pinch parsley leaves, mixed into celery and celery leaves Deviled Eggs 4 orders 8 eggs, still cold from the fridge 3 Tablespoons Dijon mustard ∂ cup Hellmann's mayonnaise flat-leaf Italian parsley Bring large pot of water to a boil. Pierce the eggs at the tip with a pushpin to prevent exploding. Arrange eggs in the basket of the spider and gently lower them into the boiling water. This way they won't crack from free-falling to the bottom of the pot when you are adding them. Let boil 10 minutes, including the minutes it takes for water to return to boil after adding the cold eggs. Moving quickly, retrieve 1 egg and crack it all the way open, in half, to see what you have inside. (If center has any rareness larger than a dime, continue cooking half a minute.) If thoroughly cooked, drain eggs, rough them around in the dry pot to crackle their shells all over, then quickly turn them out into a frigid ice bath to stop the cooking. It helps with the cooling and the peeling to let the ice water permeate the cracked shells. Peel the eggs. Cut the eggs in half neatly and retrieve the cooked yolk from each. Place the hollow, cooked whites into a container with plenty of cold fresh water and let them soak to remove any cooked yolk from their cavities. Blend yolks in food processor with mustard and mayonnaise. Make sure the bite of the Dijon can make itself felt through the muffle of the rich egg yolk and the neutralizing mayonnaise. Scrape all the egg mixture from the processor bowl into a disposable pastry bag fitted with a ∑-inch closed star tip, but do not snip the closed tip of the bag until you are ready to pipe. Fit the pastry bag into a clean empty quart container like you might put a new garbage liner into the bin--folding the excess over the lip of the quart--to make this easier on you. If you don't already know, you can stick your middle finger up into the punt of the processor bowl while scraping out the contents with the spatula, to hold the messy, sharp blade in place. Remove cooked egg whites from the cold water and lay, cavity side down, on a few stacked sheets of paper towel to allow them to drain. Don't serve the deviled eggs wet, please. When well drained, turn over eggs to reveal cavities and pipe the mixture in, more like a chrysanthemum than a soft-serve ice cream cone, please. Place on plate and finish with finely sliced parsley. Make sure that the whites are not frigidly cold from the refrigerator--allow the whites and the yolk mixture to shake off the intense chill of the lowboy. The whites get rubbery and hard and the devil mix has a congealed mouth-feel if you serve them too cold. Please take care. When there is more filling than egg white--use it to thicken the vinaigrette for poached leeks, as a condiment on family ham sandwiches, or stirred into the warm buttered lima beans on the veg plate. Excerpted from Prune by Gabrielle Hamilton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
