The Cook’s Kitchen

Preserving food by salting, drying or smoking are some of the oldest techniques known to man. And by old, I mean old. The Greeks and Romans began using salt to cure meat around 200 BC. Ancestors of the modern Chinese used salt to preserve food even earlier than that. Jumping ahead to modern times, most farm houses in the 1700’s had smoke-houses. The 1800’s gave birth to canning and later came ice houses, then refrigeration and freezing. By the early 1900’s, meat processors were able to supply good quality bacon & hams and fresh meats were readily available in larger cities. The need for preserving and curing meats at home started to decline.

Charcuterie is a French word that means pork products such as ham, bacon, fresh and dry-cured sausages etc. Even cold cuts like bologna and salami are charcuterie. I wanted to introduce you to the newest addition to my cookbook collection, Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn. It discusses technique as well as having interesting recipes. Charcuterie has very complete chapters in salt-cured food, smoked food, sausages, dry-cured food, pâtés & terrines and confit (poaching in fat). Diverse recipes like “Blackstrap Molasses Country Ham”, “English Pork Pie”, “Maryland Crab, Scallop, and Saffron Terrine” can be found side-by-side with “Garlic Sausage”, “Knackwurst” or “Maple-Cured Bacon”.

This cookbook–”one of the most intriguing and important cookbooks to be published this year,” according to Publisher’s Weekly–explores the craft of one of the oldest cooking specialties, one devoted to preservation that we still use because the food prepared this way tastes so good: pates, sausages, confit, rillettes, cured salmon, dry-cured ham. But it’s not just an old speciality, it’s one that’s especially suited to the dynamic food scene and this country’s explosive interest in food and cooking.

So if you enjoy this type of cooking as a hobby, a craft or an art form, this might be a good addition to your cookbook collection.