A Chef’s Guide to Sumptuous Writing

From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New Yorker noted in a review shortly after the restaurant’s opening) “hails from New Jersey but cooks more like a French countrywoman.” That may be true—the restaurant was renowned for, among other things, radishes served with butter and salt. But Hamilton is also a celebrated author. In 2011, she published “Blood, Bones & Butter,” a memoir that is about her chaotic upbringing in rural Pennsylvania as much as it is about her career. Hamilton returned to the subject of her family with “Next of Kin,” which was released earlier this fall. Its characters include her overbearing yet emotionally detached father and her mother, a former ballerina who “taught her everything” she knows “about eating and cooking”—and from whom she was estranged for thirty years. Not long ago, Hamilton joined us to discuss a few of the books that have guided her as a writer. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

Draft No. 4

by John McPhee

This is McPhee’s guide to writing nonfiction. I don’t know. It might be out of fashion to admire such rigor, but I will still argue for it—I will still argue that you should have one hundred conversations with your editor about a word. Does that make me nostalgic? I feel like recently lots of people around me have been saying that we live in a “post-literate world.” I guess, if that’s true, I’m going to stand on the deck of the Titanic. I just think that we should insist that words matter. It’s important that your facts are checked, and sometimes it’s important for a certain formality to be there on the page. And McPhee, here, really makes the argument for careful, correct craft beautifully. He articulates a truth that isn’t faddish or trendy—a kind of truth that doesn’t expire.

The Writing Life

by Annie Dillard

It took me forever to read Dillard’s breakout book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which came out in 1974. But once I got on to her, I couldn’t get away from her. I just think that when you read her writing, you get to witness an astonishing mind at work.

“The Writing Life” is aspirational to me because, among other reasons, Dillard is so fucking funny. She has a profound and self-deprecating humor. Dillard has always felt like a person who can be playful and silly even while being incredibly smart. She reminds me of the people that I met in graduate school who picked up the very difficult language of theory but were so fluent that they could just riff and have fun and play. Meanwhile, back then, I felt like I was barely hanging on to the back of the bus by the fender while it was barrelling ahead.

One Writer’s Beginnings

by Eudora Welty

I bought this book when I was seventeen, and I really admire it. It’s all about how Welty became a writer—or, really, how she started to notice that maybe she had the quality of observation that makes someone a writer. There’s a part where she’s lying on the floor of the dining room of her house, reading. It so mirrored my own existence as a young person. I started to write young, and at the time I was such an observer—a person who noticed all the little sounds in the house, who liked to watch the particles of dust in the shafts of sunlight. It was just so exciting and so satisfying to read a description of a similar experience in Welty’s book and to think, Oh, my god, I’m doing that, too. Maybe I’m a writer, too.

Pig Earth

by John Berger

I love Berger’s “Into Their Labours” series, but I would say that “Pig Earth” is the freaking Bible for me. I always look to this book as a guide for food writing. The way he talks about food is interesting because it’s not really about the food—it’s a way of talking about peasantry, and agricultural labor, and class. For me, even when I’m writing about the tomato salad at such-and-such restaurant or about the cheese at such-and-such cheese store, as I did when I had a column at the Times, it’s important for me to have writing like Berger’s in the back of my mind.

There’s something about food writing—for me, at least—where you can feel like it’s cheap and disposable. It can disappear in two weeks. And to an extent it probably should. But there’s something about Berger’s approach—which is in all of his books—that feels evergreen. He’s always talking about the brandy or the soup or the wine. How a character is collecting walnuts or has a fistful of berries in her hand. Or how the leeks are under a bank of snow outside as someone is lying on their deathbed inside. He makes food a part of life.