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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

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