Meat & Charcuterie

Meat & Charcuterie covers the entire journey from animal to plate, including butchery, ageing, cooking and preserving.

Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie from 2005 is the category's reference work and the book that more or less revived home charcuterie in the English speaking world. It covers salting and curing, sausage making, terrines, pâté, rillettes, confit and air drying, with the precision of measurement the work demands, because salt percentages and nitrite levels are not negotiable.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's The River Cottage Meat Book from 2004 takes a broader approach. It covers farming, animal husbandry and ethics as thoroughly as butchery and roasting, based on the premise that anyone who eats meat should understand what that entails.

Adam Danforth's books show butchery step by step in photographs, something that is difficult to learn from prose alone.

The section also includes offal and the less obvious cuts, including liver, kidney, tongue, marrow and skin, which are cheaper, more flavourful and far more widely used in traditional cooking than they are today.