Basic Butchering of Livestock & Game by John J. Mettler (Storey Publishing, 1986)—An easy-to-follow, hands-on guide for turning rabbits into roasts and steers into steaks (along with plenty of animals in between), including the tools needed for each job.
Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by Rytek Kutas—The Bible for the do-it-yourself sausage-maker is sold, aptly enough, at SausageMaker.com. It has nearly 200 recipes for everything from fresh pork sausage to smoke-cured fish.
How to Cook Meat by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby—The name says it all. Schlesinger is the owner of the groundbreaking East Coast Grill & Raw Bar in Cambridge, MA. Willoughby is the executive editor of Gourmet magazine.
Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them by Peter Kaminsky (Hyperion Books, 2005)—One of the all-time great food travelogues. The N.Y. Times outdoors writer crisscrossed to globe to find the perfect ham, and discovered it in the form of acorn-fed swine from Spain.
Pork & Sons by Stephane Reynaud (Phaidon Press, 2007)—A gorgeous cookbook filled with romantic vignettes of the butcher’s life in the rural French Alps. The original French-language version was named France’s best cookbook of 2005.
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