If it feels right in the moment, then it must be right.” “A lot of young people are driven to pick your path and stick to it and don’t veer off,” notes Hamilton. After looking at it, she started writing menus in her mind. That was never on my mind.” Dashing to move her car one morning, a neighbor asked if she was still cooking and mentioned that the space was vacant.
In fact, she writes, “I was not looking to open a restaurant. Hamilton seems to have fallen into many of these relationships and her career as if by accident. I saw in her an opportunity to recreate family or insert myself into a family that wasn’t exactly mine, but if you squinted it would work.”
Looking back, Hamilton now says: “Alda held the promise of family as I hoped to recuperate it from the one I had lost when our family imploded from divorce. Pickled lily bulbs, lampascioni, a rhizome that looks a great deal like pearl onions…I am honored that she thinks I am familiar with all these ingredients but even on the few occasions I am, I am dying to learn what she does with them.” “She will toss me an ingredient she found at that morning’s market in Tricase and look at me, expecting to me to know what to do with it,” Hamilton writes, “a whole fish, an octopus, a piece of hard-to-find meat. And much later, after she'd opened Prune and impulsively married an immigrant doctor, she bonded with her Italian mother-in-law, Alda, through their shared language in the kitchen. In a lonely period in Michigan, the head of a catering company, Misty, befriended her and reignited Hamilton's passion for cooking.
While back-packing in Europe, family friend Marie, who owned a creperie in a rural town in France, sheltered and introduced her to the culinary customs of baguettes and room-temperature produce. Her food education later blossomed under the care of several women who took her in as kin. "As soon as I saw the three-bin stainless steel pot sink, exactly like ours, I felt instantly at home and fell into peeling potatoes and scraping plates for the dishwasher like it was my own skin," she writes. She lied about her age to get her first service job at 13. When, as a teenager, divorce ripped apart the family she knew, Hamilton found jobs in the food industry to comfort her and literally put food in her mouth.
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