Garlic, Marrow, Galvanized Prune

Marrow?

Um.

Marrow on toast?

Better.

Marrow on toast with crumbs of grey salt?

Mmm.

Marrow on toast with salt and a dressed sprig of parsley and a caper and a slice of a cornichon?

Oh yes. Yes. Perfect explosion of crunch and unctuous and salt and brightness.

I had dinner at Prune, dinner on the heels of reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s "Blood, Bones & Butter". And the marrow bones are threaded throughout the book, so of course we had to have them.

Hamilton’s passion for simple food, expertly prepared from well-sourced ingredients leaps out of the book – I want to taste that, and make orecchiette with my Italian mother-in-law, drink a cocktail on the terrace in the south of Italy. So eating in her (little) restaurant, though she wasn’t in the (tiny) kitchen, felt perfectly familiar without my having ever been there before.

And oddly enough, the little restaurant was precisely the kind of place my mother would have liked, what with the funky mirror over the bar, and the mismatched steak knives, and the small galvanized metal tubs, and the brown paper “tablecloths”. I say oddly because one of the sections of the book that resonated strongly for me was the part about Hamilton’s mother - her frugal, stylish, divorced mother, about whom she says:

My most relieving, comforting experiences surrounding my mother are when strangers meet her and later say to me, “Wow. She is one piece of work.”

Because my frugal, divorced mother had an unerring sense of home décor, and too was a piece of work.

I ordered the lamb chop, a blade chop, the kind of chop even my mother wouldn’t buy. Too cheap, too déclassé. Actually, my mother never bought lamb chops: the good rib chops were too dear, the affordable blade chops weren’t worth eating. But Prune’s thick, rare, toothy blade chop, with skordalia and dandelion greens alongside – my mother would have loved it. And she’d have loved the fat grilled asparagus, thicker than my thumb, dressed with a haunting parsley béarnaise, a sauce I ran my index finger through again and again it was that haunting and delicious.

We skipped dessert; it seemed unnecessary, and proved so when the check came with a chunk of good dark chocolate for each of us – just enough.

And then I went home, back to my life. A book can be transporting; a meal can be too. I highly recommend both.