This is a charming little read and much much more than just a cook book. Its a guided tour of French charcuterie written delightfully by Grigson, while listing endless recipes for everything you could possibly ever wish to make from pork. No photos, but with writing like this they aren't missed, plenty of pencil sketches. Hugh FW eat your heart out!

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Product Description

Every town in France has at least one charcutier, whose windows are dressed with astonishing displays of good food; pates, terrines, galantines, jambon, saucissions sec and boudins. The charcutier will also sell olives, anchovies, condiments as well as various salads of his own creation, making a visit the perfect stop to assemble picnics and impromptu meals. But the real skill of the charcutier lies in his transformation of the pig into an array of delicacies; a trade which goes back at least as far as classical Rome, when Gaul was famed for its hams. First published in 1969 but unavailable for many years, Jane Grigson's "Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery" is a guidebook and a recipe book. She describes every type of charcuterie available for purchase and how to make them yourself. She describes how to braise, roast, pot-roast and stew all the cuts of pork, how to make terrines, how to cure your own ham and make your own sausages.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10537 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
"Jane Grigson left to the English-speaking world a legacy of fine writing on food and cookery for which no exact parallel exists..." Alan Davidson "Jane Grigson likes to conjure. She is marvellous at putting food into a culture-context..." The Times

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Customer Reviews

Best sausages you'll ever taste :-)
This is an absolutely superb book, but I wouldn't have expected anything less from Jane Grigson. The background to the recipes makes it a joy to read, and the recipes are easy to follow and invariably delicious. Some of the recipes use ingredients which require an understanding butcher, but most are readily available - and when you've tried some of them (such as the magnificent saucisse de campagne and boudin noir), you'll never want to see the insipid supermarket versions again. The perfect introduction to French charcuterie!

An all time cookery classic !
This is a book for anyone who has stood drooling at the spécialités du terroir in a French charcutier's window. How to do absolutely anything with every bit of a pig. All the tricks of the trade are here. A book of great erudition written in a clear and entertaining style by one of the really great cookery writers. Every true foodie needs a copy.

Not as good as it could be
This book is well informed and an excellent source of traditional French charcuterie recipes. However it only gets three stars for the following reasons. Firstly this edition suffers from sloppy editing. Some recipes and passages of text appear to have words and sentences missing which render those sections useless.

Secondly things have moved on in the use of salpetre and cure mixtures that are better covered in e.g. "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing", particularly because we now recognise health implications in their use.

This book is good for reference but there are better books (see above) for the uninitiated