Gabrielle Hamilton

Owner and chef of New York's Prune restaurant, Gabrielle also happens to be a trained writer (M.F.A., University of Michigan). The youngest of five siblings born to a French mother who cooked "tails, claws, and marrow-filled bones" in a good skirt, high heels, and apron, and an artist father who made the sets for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus (among other things), Hamilton spent her early years in a vast old house in Bucks County, PA. With the divorce of her parents when she was an adolescent, the author was largely left to her own devices, working at odd jobs in restaurants. Peeling potatoes and scraping plates-"And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start."