Charcuterie: A Book and a Year, In Review

A Book and a Year, In Review



About this time a year ago I decided 2006 was going to be the year I finally satisfied a cooking urge I'd been harboring for 10 or 12 years — 2006 was going to be my year of the pig. In particular, it was going to be the year I started learning charcuterie.

Around 2000 I bought the grinder attachment for my Kitchen Aid and a rather pitiful book on making sausage (The Sausage-Making Cookbook).

I tried a couple of recipes, but the results were pitiful — mainly because the author failed to address the issue of having sufficient quantities of fat. So after two or three incredibly dry batches of sausage I lost interest, although I did continue to grind my own beef, pork, and lamb.

Having reawakened my ambition to make sausage, I bought Bruce Aidells's Complete Sausage Book and proceeded to start making sausage including Mititei, Kofta, Italian sausage, and bratwurst. I've also made several batches of breakfast sausage, but although it's no longer dry, I still haven't found the flavor I'm looking for.

A couple of months ago I bought Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. I mentioned the book back in this article on smoked duck breasts, but I wanted to wait until I'd had a chance to try more recipes before writing a genuine review.

The book was a revelation. I started flipping though it when it arrived, something caught my eye, that led me back to the introduction, and before I knew it I'd read half the book. Literally. Every description, every recipe. I even hauled down my Bruce Aidell book to make a couple of comparisons. Charcuterie is one of the best-written books I've read this year — perhaps because it's neither a cookbook, though it is a book of recipes, nor a cooking manual, though it does present the technical aspects of the art of charcuterie.

Here's an example of what captivated me: "A powerful mania descended on me a decade ago when I first tasted duck confit…." What serious cook can't identify with such a statement, such a sentiment whether about confit or asparagus? Elsewhere Ruhlman writes, "Embrace the sausage." I wish I had the gift for expressing such simple unadorned passion.

Curious, I asked Ruhlman how he got involved in cooking and he said he'd seen Julia Child make an apple pie on TV and then made his own "rather bad" effort. "[It] always seemed natural, cooking, especially if you love to eat. [I] began writing and cooking at same age, I think they're linked for me."

The prose, even when describing how to do something, is smooth, flowing, readable. Ruhlman's background as an English major and then writer and editor is evident.

Polcyn, Ruhlman's partner and the source of the expertise, clearly has as deep a knowledge of preparing and preserving meats as Ruhlman does of expressing that knowledge.

The book's 300 plus pages contain six sections (not counting the introduction and a final chapter on "Recipes to Accompany Charcuterie"). The sections cover salt-cured food, smoked food, sausages, dry-cured food, pâtés and terrines, and "The Confit Technique." I haven't even begun to explore the material in practice, but I have read the book and made enough recipes to think I can judge the quality from the standpoint of an experienced cook learning a new method of preparing food.

As I mentioned in the piece on Smoked Duck Breasts, they're extraordinary and, after reading the recipe, straight-forward to prepare. Since then I've also used the All-Purpose Brine on a pork loin, it's a good solid basic recipe (compared to many I've seen or tried) and is readily adaptable to modification.

The pancetta is

easy to make, although I haven’t yet eaten any because it's still drying. The pork confit is excellent. I liked the Italian sausage better than Aidell's, but I need to go back and try them side by side to figure out why. I also liked the Shrimp and Salmon Terrine with Spinach and Mushrooms, but next time I make it I think I'll add some fresh lemon zest to make it brighter.

On the down side, rendering pork fat for lard requires (in my experience) making a point of trimming off all the attached meat or you won't be able to avoid browning the lard to get out most of the fat. This may be an issue for me because I can’t get enough leaf fat to make lard and so use a mixture of whatever pork fats I can get. Polcyn, on the other hand, is a chef and has access to resources that many readers won't. This brings up a related point.

The recipes typically produce five or more pounds of sausage, confit, or whatever. That's a lot for what will, for most people, be an experiment. If you figure a single link of bratwurst is about 1/4 of a pound, then that's enough sausage for 15 to 20 servings. Suppose you screw something up? The recipes are certainly scalable, but I suspect that I'll be scaling all of them down for a 1st batch, and in some cases for all batches.

Though I'm sure I'll find more nits to pick as I continue to explore Charuterie, this is a great book. Eminently readable, clearly knowledgeable, and thorough, it's earned a place, not on my bookshelf so much, as under my coffee table so I'll have it handy as my second Year of Charcuterie begins.

Pork Confit

Technorati: Food | review | Charcuterie | Pancetta | Pork confit | sausage | smoking | food preservation