Sardine Sandwich: My Grief Re-branded

Don't mind the mess.

Four years ago, I sat down and decided that cooking my way through a cookbook would be the key to solving the identity crisis I was experiencing in my mid-to-late twenties. I hoped that this time, this particular hyperfixation, would propel me to a version of myself that I associated with success.

A lot was riding on my ability to not only cook through a cookbook cover-to-cover, but to film, edit, and amplify it on social media. All of which I’d never done before. And then, I had this thought: How can I make this harder for myself?

Intentionally, I chose not to do Ina Garten or Martha Stewart, whose cookbooks are quite literally designed for home cooks. At the time, I didn’t even have those books on my shelf (a sin that has since been remedied). I kept reinforcing this idea that in order to be taken seriously by serious cooking folks, I needed to do something much more difficult. I cast aside any doubt I had about the likelihood of me accomplishing the forced mission I laid for myself, and began to scan my bookshelf for a suitable cookbook.

The top contenders were as follows: Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking — a classic, but done a million times over. Fergus Henderson’s The Complete Nose To Tail. Thankfully, I talked myself out of that one. Sean Brock’s South, which I loved, but sourcing such hyperlocal ingredients seemed too daunting. Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food, that one might have been the right call. And then, there was Prune by Gabrielle Hamilton.

I was in my early twenties when I came across Gabrielle’s episode on PBS’s Mind of a Chef. I watched as she unveiled a familiar witches’ brew of octopus, thyme, garlic, and chilies. Once the octopus was cooked, instead of just discarding the now-deep-purple cooking liquid, she repurposed it to braise pork shoulder. Then she used that octo-pork liquid again, this time adding chorizo and periwinkles (sea snails she lovingly dubbed, “the garbage of the sea”). She served the whole thing in a hearty bowl with some crusty bread alongside pearl-tipped needles and a wine cork (the needles being there to pry the snails from their shells, the wine cork acting as a pin cushion).

The same ingredient transformed three times over, each time earning more whimsy. Everything dressed or marinated in or accompanied by extra virgin olive oil, parsley, garlic, and lemon juice–ubiquitous ingredients and flavors found in Mediterranean cooking. The food I grew up with, in its simplest and purest form.

She placed eggplants directly on stove top burners. As the nightshades caught fire, I could almost smell their char. She fried sardine spines and arranged them into golden fishtail bouquets atop linen napkins—my family’s Christmas Eve dinner turned ‘chef’s treat’. She laid down sheets of thinly sliced octo-braised pork shoulder, tonnato sauce, capers, twisted lemon wheels, and jokingly referred to it as her ‘meat flower.’ Even down to the vintage lace tablecloths, doily-lined silver serving trays, and Prune’s signature garnish of lemon wedges and parsley stems, her food was simple, unapologetic, intentional, classic, and true. Its weirdness demanded to be seen, to be admired. And the way that she talked about food:

“I want the real deal. I can’t always go to the downtown MoMA and see the big sculpture made out of Clorox bottles. I want to see some painting, some technique.”

“I don’t think that what most people think is perfect is perfect. I like it perfectly bent.”

“It’s so good to be classic and not trendy.”

“Queer, tender, true. I like those things.”

Something within me felt validated. Everything about Gabrielle as a chef felt gritty and sincere, yet poised and elegant—reminiscent of matriarchs, Sunday mornings, and ghosts of kitchens past. I thought, maybe if I cooked her food, all the complexities of my personality, including my insecurities and shortcomings, would somehow be rectified.

And so the obtuse, stubborn 27-year-old woman that I was, swallowed a big fat denial pill in the hopes that this time I’d finally come out victorious in overcoming my consistent lack of follow-through. It was decided. I was going to cook through Prune.

Four years and 125+ recipes later, and we still aren’t complete. To those who actually know the cookbook, they know it’s a literal reprinting of the restaurant’s handbook. The pages are lined with grease stains, masking tape, post-its, and handwritten notes of how much to prep for dinner service, and what to definitely not fuck up. To my insecure, overachieving, rigid personality, Gabrielle was the teacher who never seemed impressed, but whose approval I felt compelled to earn.

Doomed even before I started.

Let’s start with the obvious. Prune, the cookbook, was never meant to be cooked-cover-to cover by a lonesome home cook. It was intended to be a manual for Prune’s staff. And once published, it became an artifact of one of the most quietly influential restaurants New York ever produced. The kind of place that shaped how a generation of chefs thought about simplicity, restraint, and what a restaurant could be.

More obvious, the actual cooking content was geared toward seasoned cooking professionals. Many of the dishes contained components that often needed to be prepped days, weeks, and sometimes months ahead of time. To top things off, the recipes frequently featured hyper-specific ingredients that are quite accessible in the culinary mecca of Manhattan, but not so much in the suburbs of South Jersey.

I once called a local butcher asking if they carried caul fat. The woman on the other end of the phone responded the only way a respected, hard-working New Jersey woman ever could, “I don’t even know what that is.”

It wasn’t anyone else’s fault but mine. The mental gymnastics required for this project were always tangled in a web of random (and overly expensive) starts and stops. Each time, beginning the same: Maybe this time, I wouldn’t fail. Maybe, through conquering an impossible project such as this, I’d finally gain the confidence I needed to be taken seriously by everyone who ever doubted my intelligence, acumen, and capability. Myself being first.

During the filming process, I would begin to second-guess my forced perspective with progressive masochism. Why am I holding the knife like that? Don’t forget to clean the counter. This is a waste of time. That fish is butchered to hell. You can’t edit for shit. No one actually cares about this. You’ll never live up to this inflated narcissistic image you have of yourself (that one might be true).

The project would then come to a predictable halt, often following a recent Instagram Story that ‘I was so back!’ When I did come back, I felt like I was jinxing myself before I even started. It was imperative to my insatiable inner critic that every recipe, every shot, every voice over, and every edit looked perfect. So perfect, that when I look back all I see is a scared-shitless, little girl cosplaying the person I actually wanted to be. Fueled by fear and self-loathing disguised as pretentious, non-earned expertise—it was the exact opposite of truth.

Exhausted, confused, and a little embarrassed, it was important to me during these last couple of starts and stops to not only understand the original why behind this project, but to ask myself, do I really want to continue this torture? And the answer is: no, I don’t. Not in the way I’ve been doing it.

After four years and 125 recipes, I’m not the same person I was when I first began. I don’t want the same things I once did. My life looks completely different. And when it comes to projecting my hopes, my dreams, and my failures onto Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton, and the fictionalized persona I have of her in my head, I would quite literally rather be doing anything else.

In that admission, something loosened.

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Could that really be the lesson of it all? Could it be that my life is much more extraordinary than I ever gave it credit? That I don’t need to constantly be proving something. That I, along with my quarry of emotional scars, am allowed to take up space. To do the things I want to do. To be the person I want to be, which is…me.

I don’t fully understand where I’m going. I don’t know what everything will look like or how it will come together. My eyes are still settling on the paths laid out before me. One thing is for certain: what I want most is this. Exactly this.

To have a space to fully explore the things I love and that feed my soul. To create what I hope to be whimsical images of delicious food. Filmed in a way that calls back to childhood, when we all had the same view from the kitchen chair we were standing on, next to the person we loved most in this world. And to write the raw, messy, and beautiful stories only I was meant to tell.

What this means for my Prune-Opus, I’ll leave open to time.

All I know is, I’m not afraid anymore.

I hope you like it here.