New chef cookbook takes you into the restaurant kitchen

Chef cookbooks have come a long way since the day of glossy vanity projects.

Famous chefs pictured in these tomes would strike poses in their crisp kitchen whites, arms crossed, toques pert, expressions on their faces that you might recognize from Greek statuary. The recipes seemed nearly beyond the scope of non-kitchen gods, impossibly beautiful on the plate and assembled in stages. You would be instructed to roast veal bones for demiglace and carve tomatoes into roses for garnish.

Such worshipful cookbooks have become rare. Today’s chefs are more eager to prove they’re regular folk, and their books picture them cooking for their children and interacting with their communities. We see them delightedly shopping at their local farmers markets, clutching bunches of Swiss chard with rainbow-colored stems. Their recipes tend toward the local and seasonal, straightforward enough for the home cook with perhaps a touch of the personality that made them famous to begin with. The text turns toward the chatty, with headnotes at the top of each recipe extolling the pleasures of a ripe peach or recalling a grandmother’s garden.

Gabrielle Hamilton, a New York chef, will have none of that. Her recently released “Prune” cookbook (Random House, $45), named for her diorama-sized East Village restaurant, effectively blows a raspberry at every trend in cookbook publishing.

Covered in hot pink canvas with an elastic closure like that of a Moleskine, the book is supposed to evoke a spirited restaurant cook’s notebook. The pages are splattered with drips of fake grease, covered with fake masking tape and annotated with fake handwritten magic marker notes. But there are nearly no headnotes, chapter headers or even an introduction. You want to know about how Hamilton’s upbringing affected her cooking? Then buy her memoir, “Bone, Blood & Butter.”

This cookbook is Hamilton’s fantasy operations manual for line cooks at Prune (albeit illustrated with gorgeous food photography), each recipe typed out and scribbled over in her inimitable instructive prose. She is stern, demanding, funny, frugal, careful with her word selection and prone to the occasional amuse-bouche of poetic longing. She seems like a terrifying boss, but also a great one.

Her notes brim with all the little kitchen tricks that guests fully appreciate if only half notice. Parsley leaves need rumpling to release their green aroma. Deviled eggs are all about serving at the right temperature.

Then there are the cooking tips. Run precooked bacon under a broiler for 20 seconds to bring it back to life. Use heat-resistant rubber spatulas instead of whisks for stirring hot custard, as they can scrape the crevasses of the pot where the custard will burn. You will learn a hundred things to make you a better cook.

There are also some sly, funny restaurant insider bits that will appeal to professionals and fanboys alike. When she talks about slicing serrano ham for a dish, she includes instructions to quickly take the cured meat off the counter and stick it in the oven if the health inspector comes. Her chapter on preparing “family meal” (i.e., the staff meal), and why it has to mean something, is the one place in the book where she steps away from the process of restaurant cooking and addresses the calling of the profession.

I first became aware of Hamilton when she wrote an excellent feature for a food magazine about why she uses some convenience products, such as canned chicken broth and chickpeas. (In the cookbook, she specifies that some dishes require canned College Inn broth and not the restaurant’s homemade stock.) She got a lot of press for her signature appetizer: tinned sardines with mustard and Triscuits, which was another way of blowing a raspberry at expectations.

I once ate at Prune, and the sardines were just what you’d expect and better than you’d expect as a nibble to go with cocktails. The rest of the food I tried was precise, simple and distinctive.

Those qualities very much come through in the recipes in the book: wilted salads dressed with rosemary lemon chicken drippings, grilled head-on shrimp with anchovy butter, beef short ribs braised in pho broth, ripe beefsteak tomatoes dressed only with melted butter and flaky salt. There are many easy recipes with painstaking instructions. Her language cuts, prickles and jumps with observations. When she says to use “burning, sticky” garlic, you know exactly that freshly cured clove and how it tastes.