An unusual cookbook gets an index

When Prune by Gabrielle Hamilton emerged in late 2014, people quickly noticed that this was no ordinary cookbook. Hamilton, a James Beard Award-winning chef, decided that she wasn’t going to write the usual recipe collection aimed at home cooks. Instead, she decided to write to the audience she knew best: restaurant line cooks. The result was a book that looks – and works – differently than others in the genre. Annotations are written in Hamilton’s own hand, and the book’s design is intended to replicate the kitchen binders found in her NYC restaurant.

There was another quirk about this cookbook – it didn’t have an index. This stymied some owners of the cookbook and put off others who didn’t want to purchase the hefty book (it clocks in at 576 pages) if they couldn’t easily access the information. Here at Eat Your Books we recognized that we were uniquely positioned to help. Our team had already indexed Prune for use by our Members who owned the book. Using the EYB index as the starting point, we worked with Gabrielle and her team on a design that would complement the book. The result is an index hosted on the Prune restaurant website that can be printed out and kept with the book. 

This is the first time EYB has created a printable index to accompany a cookbook, and we were excited to work with this talented chef and her team to make something extremely useful for the owners of the Prune cookbook.