Gabrielle Hamilton Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Cookbooks

Publication Order of Anthologies

Gabrielle Hamilton is a published American author and chef.

She was born in 1966 and was the chef and owner of Prune, a restaurant that has now closed but used to operate in New York City’s East Village.

The author grew up in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She said in an interview with NPR that her way of eating and cooking was influenced a lot by her French mother. Gabrielle recounted that her mother did not waste food and the family would frequently forage for fresh ingredients sourced either from their garden or from the fields and the woods around their house.

Hamilton attended Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan.

After working in catering, the author opened Prune in 1999. She didn’t have experience in restaurants and did not go to culinary school but regardless her restaurant received a lot of acclaim and admiration and joined the Bib Gourmand section of the Michelin 2014 New York Guide. She was featured on The Mind of a Chef, a television show on PBS, and was a guest judge on the first season of ABC’s The Taste.

She released her memoir, which came out in 2011 and received much critical acclaim. Anthony Bourdain called it ‘simply the best memoir by a chef ever’. This was followed by Prune, a 2014 cookbook. She has also written several essays and has reported for publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker.

Hamilton got the James Beard award for best chef in NYC in 2011 and then in 2012 for her chef memoir. She won Outstanding Chef in 2018 and a James Beard Award in 2015 for journalism for the piece that she wrote for Afar, a travel magazine. The piece documents wines and winemakers in Sicily, Italy.

She was married to Michele Fuortes for ten years. The pair had two children together but would later divorce. Hamilton then got married again to Ashley Merriman, her co-chef at Prune. Gabrielle’s sister Melissa is also in the food world as a writer and chef. Their father was also the owner of Hamilton’s Grill Room while he was still alive.

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is an early memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton. If you love a good nonfiction and you love a good memoir, this is a great selection. Add in a love of food and restaurants in there and you are really cooking!

Before Gabrielle opened up her restaurant Prune, she had spent twenty years of her life attempting to try and find purpose and meaning. This book follows along on a journey that goes through the many different kitchens that the author has been in through the years. This includes the kitchen of her childhood, where her mother stood over the oven with her wooden spoon in her hand, the kitchens of France, Turkey and Greece where strangers fed her and she learned about hospitality, her kitchen at Prune, and the kitchen of her mother in law.

Gabrielle lovingly takes the reader through different places that she has been and on a journey through her life with food. Intimate and interesting, this is Gabrielle’s story that is told with honesty, humor, passion and more. Check it out for yourself to see what you think!

Prune: A Cookbook is an early cookbook by Gabrielle Hamilton. This is a New York times bestseller and brings readers her cookbook debut that has tons of signature recipes from Prune, her New York City restaurant. This book has been selected as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly, a book that has been picked as one of the best books of the season by publications such as Bon Appetit, EaterA, Time, and The Oprah Magazine.

Gabrielle was a self trained cook who was transformed into an award-winning chef. She opened up Prune on the Lower East Side years ago to a great reception, a ton of acclaim, and with lines that were going down around the block.

The restaurant was personal and gracious in menu and philosophy. Prune harnessed the elements of home cooking and took them to the next level in ways that were not expected. The result is food that is delicious and satisfying on a lot of levels. The book was original in concept and execution, this is a replica of what went on in that restaurant and what is contained in those binders.

The book is written to the chef’s cooks in her own voice, with the instruction, information and details that you would have if you were coming to work at the restaurant as a cook. The recipes have been tried out and tasted many times over and is the perfect resource, meant just as much for the home cook as it is for the professional.

Full of instructions, there are a range of signals for cooks and suggestions on how to complete certain dishes. The book has over 250 recipes as well as 250 color photographs. Cooks are going to love some of the recipes that were included in here, from grilled head-on shrimp with anchovy butter to octopus with salsa verde, to roasted capon on garlic crouton. There is even a chapter that is called Garbage which is a clever collection of ways to re-purpose foods that might have been garbage in other kitchens but are instead transformed into bites and more at Prune.

This book does not just contain the recipes but all of the things that made Prune the restaurant that it is. Honest and unconventional in tone and content, this book is a great cookbook that is a perfect addition to any cookbook collection that is part overview of a restaurant and partly the great recipes that made this restaurant so distinct, a place where the rules were made to be broken (as evidenced by Hamilton putting Triscuits with sardines on the menu). Check out Prune: A Cookbook by Gabrielle Hamilton to check them all out and go on this nonfiction adventure!