Buy Pork Books

Review by Antonio P. Manahan:

I have over a thousand cookbooks and I can categorically state that this is probably the most beautiful cookbook in my collection. The book’s excellent graphic design and captivating pictures transport you to a totally different place. Its a place where you know by name the people who bring the food to your table. A place where meals are thought of and not expedited. A place where more effort is used in bringing food to the table and that effort is appreciated. The overall design is so successful that the reader forgets that certain portions are about slaughtering an animal or that there is a large amount of recipes about offal. I enjoy dishes made from offal but in my experience most people don’t. My only disappointment in the book is that it does not have any recipes for making the sausages. Then again, any frenchman will tell you that a toulouse sausage is not a toulouse sausage unless it was produced in Toulouse. I highly recommend this book.

Review by Craig W. Adcock:

This book is the most inclusive, insightful, and casual cookbook I own – from the 80+ books that occupy shelves and shelves. It is worth every cent, if not actually under priced. The sketches of the cartoons are great. There are too many strengths to mention. Reynaud covers practically every use of the pig from snout to tail and does so from primitive / traditional recipes to gourmet presentations with Pork, Pork, and Pork included in every dish.

Strongly recommended.

Craig Adcock

Belly Up Bar-B-Que.

Review by B. DeSantis:

Why is it that all the people who gave this book only one star also seem to be reviewing lots of religious and Right Wing political books? George Carlin has been a well know comedian since the 60’s. He has always spoke the way he does about religion. When you see his name as the author of a book with Jesus in the title, why do you buy it if religious humor will offend you? Ok, maybe you just want to see what he has to say, I can understand that. But you know you’re not going to like it, and you know you’ll disagree with it. Why bother printing a review? You’re not basing the review on how good the book is, you’re basing it on whether you agree with it’s ideas or not. One guy even made the remark that we’ve taken the 10 Commandments out of courthouses, but we still allow this book to be sold. It’s called free speech. It’s part of the same document that give you the right to have your religion. The difference is, the comandments in a courthouse are on public display. This book is something you have to conciously use your own money to buy. Let me write a shorter review: If you’re easily offended by religious humor, don’t buy this book.

Review by JMack:

I believe some of the reviewers of this book might be expecting too much. “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?” is not Carlin’s best book, but a lot of the material is offensive to some people and funny to most of us. That’s what Carlin does, he offends people. My biggest complaint is that he did not offend enough people. I felt that too much of the book was devoted to euphemisms. The fact is that these arguments presented by Carlin are more logical than funny. By most standards, this is not a problem, unless the book is supposed to be funny.

I enjoyed a lot of the book. I enjoyed the one liners in the sections titled, “Bits and Pieces”. Nobody has a better eye for observing the stupid things people do. Whether regular people or famous people, Carlin points out the problem in a humorous way. Usually it is a shocking or offensive result. That is why people like George Carlin. If you like Carlin, you will probably like the book. It is not his best book, but it is still better than most comedian’s books.

Review by B. Marold:

The author’s name is not only above the title, but part of the title of `Bruce Aidells’s Complete Book of Pork’. And, the book fully lives up to its title and subtitle, `A Guide to Buying, Storing, and Cooking the World’s Favorite Meat’. The book includes absolutely every subject on pork I can think of, including several I did not even expect because I thought they may be too obscure for even a 320 page book on this single subject. Not only do the authors cover their territory; they do it very, very well.

As Aidells states early in the book, this work is for people who like to create their own recipes with pork. While pork may be the world’s favorite meat, it may also be one of the most difficult, especially today in the United States, where so much fat has been bread out of our porkers that older James Beard and Joy of Cooking recipes for pork may simply not even work any more, in that there is not enough fat moisture in some cuts to support exposure to high heat for the time needed to get the inside of the meat up to the old standard temperature to insure that chance of trichinosis or botulism is removed. One of the greater ironies of meat cooking is that if you cook pork loin or pork tenderloin with wet heat over 160 degrees Fahrenheit for very long, you will end up with dry, stringy meat in spite of the cooking in water.

So, one of the first and most important parts of the book is how to select cuts of pork and match them to the appropriate cooking method. Regarding selecting meat, I must have been incredibly lucky or terribly inattentive, as I have never seen many of the pathologies against which Aidells warns us. Still, it is very rewarding to know of these things and feel much better prepared to select meat at unfamiliar location such as the new farmer’s market or warehouse store.

One surprise in the matching of meat to method is Aidells’s counting leg and shin meat among the more tender cuts. The usual rule is that the further from the hoof or the horn, the more tender the meat. Well, I guess this doesn’t work for pigs, as they have no horns. But, the principle of cooking tender meat by dry methods (grilling, roasting, sautéing, frying and broiling) and tough meat by wet methods (braising, stewing, poaching and steaming) is as true for pork as it is for beef. One thing that is true of pork and other `white meat’ and not true of beef is the efficacy of brining in making the final cooked product moister. Brining pork is a very popular subject which has been explored by all the usual authorities such as Shirley Corriher and Harold McGee. The virtue of Aidells’s book is that the technique is discussed in great detail, in connection with all the appropriate recipes.

Aidells’s range of recipes for pork is not only broad, it is also of a very high quality. One of the first recipes I examined was for a strata made from sausage meat. As I just finished making a strata recipe from Wolfgang Puck’s new book, I was really unhappy that I had not seen Aidells’s recipe first, as it appears to be a much more interesting preparation. I was also very pleasantly surprised to see a recipe for a Philippine pork adobo recipe that was better than the one in my Philippine cookbook. The book does not cover every conceivable recipe. There are several famous dishes such as Chinese pork Dim Sum style steamed dumplings that are not in the book, but then, this recipe is more about the technique involved in the dumpling than it is with the pork.

The very best thing I found with this book is that all recipes use relatively simple techniques and equipment. One can spend tens of thousands of dollars on expert smoking equipment, but Aidells shows us how to do it with nothing more than a 0 Weber dome grill. I definitely approve of this. Also, he gives us instructions on how to make fresh sausage using a manual meat grinder, a KitchenAid meat grinding attachment, or a food processor. While I would not want to go through the difficulties of this technique, he even describes how to stuff sausage using a piping bag. I draw the line here and I have no difficulty in investing in the proper KitchenAid apparatus.

In addition to fresh sausage, the authors cover virtually every other pork processing and preserving technique such as making bacon, hams, and cured sausage such as salami. I was especially pleased to see the authors open the chapter on terrines by associating this technique with meatloaf. This association should immediately make pate and Terrine techniques friendlier to a reader who may associate them with old school French cuisine, done by no one who is not wearing a toque. My favorite recipe in this chapter is for a Polpettone Napoletano. I have seen Mario Batali make a polpettone (Italian for large meatball), but it has never quite inspired me as well as Aidells’ dish. As written, it serves 12 to 16, so it is a super entertaining dish for delivering protein economically to a buffet crowd of unknown size.

As pork curing products are not standard items even at good local butcher shops, the author provides an excellent list of suppliers including both familiar (Nieman ranch, Dean and Delucca, Penzey’s) and unfamiliar sources for speciality meats and materials.

The best thing I can say about this book is that it is every bit as good as expected. And, as this is one of the most useful kinds of books for the creative chef or wannabe creative chef, I say buy it now. You will find what you need and a lot of pleasant surprises as well.

Review by Jadepearl:

Bruce Aidell is one of my favorite cookbook writers. Every book he has written has been solid gold in its use and depth of knowledge. For people who are fans of his _complete meat cookbook_ this is the volume to have. the first book is a masterwork for those who need to not only cook meat but to understand its background and want to have substantive knowledge on every aspect of it.

Taking off and enhancing the information found in the pork section he goes truly in depth on the subject of pork. The section on brining today’s industrial pork is well worth the price of the book. I am pleased to say that he does not repeat anything from his earlier book so you are definitely getting new material.

Aidell is renowned as one of the early members of the northern California cooking scene and is known to some as the chicken sausage king – yes, it is THAT Aidell who sparked the gourmet sausage movement so, trust the man on his meat.

Everyone can cook from this book since it does not use complicated cooking methods and the spices and ingredients are readily available through the supermarket or from a trusted butcher (uncommon cuts like shin or cheek) it is accessable to anyone.

Highest recommendations for the cooking library and for cooks who prepare a great meal.

Review by Michael J. Mazza:

“Pork Chop Hill,” by S.L.A. Marshall, is a nonfiction work about combat during the Korean War. The title page bears the subtitle “The American Fighting Man in Action–Korea, Spring, 1953.” The book’s copyright page notes that a William Morrow edition was published in 1956. In the preface, author Marshall recounts that he went to Korea in 1953 to work as a war correspondent, but at Army request he took on the job of investigating and analyzing infantry tactics. He describes how he held question-and-answer sessions with groups of soldiers who had been in combat. This interesting glimpse behind the making of the book adds to the text as a whole.

Marshall describes many intense, horrific, bloody scenes of combat. He vividly portrays the agonizing suffering endured by these combat troops. He covers many significant topics, among them the following: Chinese military tactics; how U.S. and Korean troops worked together; communication on the battlefield; leadership and organization; the impact of terrain on battle; and types of weapons used. I found one of the book’s most interesting sections to be an account of the Ethiopian troops who fought in the war–Marshall praises these African soldiers greatly.

The book features maps and drawings by H. Garver Miller. Marshall includes a number of illuminating quotes from the fighting troops. He vividly describes how confusing the battlefield can become–the phrase “the fog of war” came to my mind over and over again as I read this book. Another phrase that this book brings to my mind is simply: “War is hell.” This gripping, graphic work really makes me appreciate the remarkable challenge faced by troops in the Korean War, and the valor with which so many faced that challenge.

Review by :

The thing that gets me about this book is that it appears that many of the problems Marshall points out from his on-the-spot interviews with Korean war troopers are EXACTLY the ones that had such a devastating impact on our Vietnam war soldiers. Individual trooper rotation among our forces while the enemy left veterans in place to familiarize themselves with the terrain. Casual attitudes to construction of U.S. fortifications and over-reliance of artillery support while the enemy maximized concealment and exploited it for movement and deployment. Reliance on unreliable native allies. Lack of communication about objectives. Insufficient manning of positions by understrength units. etc, etc… They say the military is always prepared for the LAST war, but typically the U.S. has always been prepared for the NEXT one.

Review by J. V. Lewis:

I am on an unholy mission to convert a few Amazonians to the pleasures of do-it-yourself charcuterie. My travels in search of gustatory ecstacy have revealed many a depressing deficiency in American food, one of the most egregious of which is the state of this country’s meats. Besides the much-publicized and lamented feed-lot economy that guarantees cheap and flavorless meat for all, we have forfeited the rich, varied, and highly-localized meat traditions of Europe. We have replaced flavor, texture, and local nuance with industrial products that satisfy the huge distributors but leave our tongues and bellies beggared. I am writing a series of reviews that laud a few recent books that do a great job in trying to rectify this impoverishment.

Perhaps the most thorough and comprehensive of the bunch is Jane Grigson’s. Over almost 350 dense, detailed pages she covers the hows and whys of charcuterie. Everything from tools and methods to the meat itself is presented in lucid prose, with a fine eye to determining what, exactly, the reader needs to know to make good meat products at home. Sausages of every kind and description, pates, terrines, puddings, saltings, fresh pork preparations, sauces, gallantines… the scope of this book approaches the scope of knowledge a Franch charcutier might possess. Few details escaped Grigson’s attention, for her purpose was no humbler than to revive charcuterie in Britain. If she accomplished nothing more than to inspire Fergus Henderson to become the greatest meat-man of his generation, she should rest in peace.

The book has many virtues, readability and enthusiasm not least among them. But its real gift is its comprehensiveness and its almost unique ability to guide the reader through unfamiliar territory. This is a real, fundamental, primary cookbook. Anything more basic would be a farming manual. Which brings me to the point I started to make at the beginning of this screed: our American meat situation is bad because we allow much too much mediation between live meat animals and what we put in our mouths. What Grigson proposes is a hands-on, direct, sensory, real involvement with the raw materials. This, as the great French and Italian food traditions demonstrate so unasailably, is fundamental to great food. When you give up the cheap pleasures of supermarket hamburger and try your hand at basic charcuterie, you will enter a world of memorable pleasures and perhaps rekindle that most basic human value: respect for the sources of what we eat.

You may find my review of Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast useful in your education as a carnivore.

Enjoy.

Review by B. Marold:

`Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery’ is the prominent 20th century English culinary writer, Jane Grigson’s first book, first published in 1967. Like her last book, `English Food’ and unlike many of her intermediate books, this is a very scholarly book that may not have much appeal to the average amateur cook. It is much closer to a technical book on how to make and cook with forcemeats and cured pork products than a source for the home cook. As I will discuss later, that doesn’t mean it has no value for the amateur cook, especially those for whom cooking has become a hobby or avocation.

Grigson is one of the most prominent disciples of the great English culinary writer, Elizabeth David, who, through Grigson, Alan Davidson, Jill Norman, Claudia Roden and American, Richard Olney has influenced a large share of a generation of English language culinary writers and restaurateurs. David is a palpable presence throughout this book with references to her works and her London cookware shop sprinkled liberally throughout the text. In a sense, this book is an extension to David’s own `French Provincial Cooking’, as Grigson picks up on one of the most important specialities of French home and commercial cooking.

I sense an increased interest in `charcuterie’ throughout the American culinary reading public. Of course, the Food Network has not yet come out with a show on `charcuterie’ but I have seen on DVD an episode on sausage making done by Julia Child and at least two of Alton Brown’s `Good Eats’ shows have been dedicated to these subjects. The most convincing evidence is the publication of the recent book, `Charcuterie’ by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Poleyn and certainly the easily satirized Emeril Lagasse exclamation that `pork fat rules’. Although it sounds like a gimmick, it is certain, confirmed by millennia of practice, that pork fat (lard) is by far the most useful animal fat, far more useful than beef s suet, chicken fat, or lamb fat. It has the finest consistency and by far the best taste, as evidenced by the high value placed on bacon fat as a flavoring throughout the European cuisines, most especially in the cuisine of the southern United States. As Grigson so neatly summarizes at the end of her book, pork fat is to ambient temperature meat preservation what sugar and acid is to fruit and vegetable preservation (pickling and preserves).

For those with no sense of what `charcuterie’ is, let me identify the most common examples. These are ham, breakfast sausage, `Italian’ sausage’, meat loaf, pates, and scrapple. As this book includes recipes for things to do with `charcuterie’ products, I recommend this as a source of recipes for things to do with ham. Outside of the thousands of uses for the famous dried hams such as Italian procuitto, German Westphalian Ham, Spanish Serrano ham, and Bayonne hams, I am often at a loss when looking for something to do with a small ham dish for one or two people. I will also recommend this book to all those who are fond of brining techniques. I can’t say this with any authority, but I suspect the current wisdom about brining springs from Grigson’s writings, as interpreted by writers such as Shirley Corriher.

Even if you have no intention whatsoever to invest in sausage making equipment or a grinder attachment to your Kitchen-aid, this is a great foodie read. And, that is not only for entertainment. The recipes for the dozens of sausages, pates, and other forcemeats can offer a wealth of ideas on making new stuffings for things like cabbage, peppers, and tomatoes.

The only problem one may experience with the procedures in this book is with the scarcity of fat on our new pig. One can only gasp at the comparison between the average American pork chop and the richly fatted chop exhibited on an `Oliver’s Twist’ show by Jamie Oliver, harvested from an artisinally raised porker in rural England.

In many ways, this is actually a better book than the much more recent Ruhlman / Poleyn book, as it covers a much broader range of procedures and recipes and takes a more critical attitude towards the subject. It is immensely reassuring to find an informed writer say that the Italian sausage, mortadella is really a bit on the bland side. And here, I thought my taste had not refined enough to appreciate this famous Italian product. And yet, for the casual reader, Ruhlman is probably a better choice as all his sources and references are modern, while Grigson often refers to sources which are nothing more than a find memory.