Meat: A Kitchen Education Book

James Peterson is my favourite cookbook author (and I have read a lot of cookbooks). I hold his book on "Sauces" (the first of his books I ever read) in near biblical esteem. His book on "Soups" is particularly distinguished because, in it, he agrees with me so frequently. His book simply titled "Meats" is not encyclopedic but near so, both in terms of techniques and of animals to cook. There is nothing in these pages about cooking salmon splayed on alder sticks around a open fire Northwest Indian style nor how to prepare fugu (pufferfish) without killing your guests. But most of the rest is in there. Chicken and turkey, fowl, rabbit, hare and venison, pork, beef, veal, lamb and goat. The politically correct may preserve their superiority over the rest of us by omitting the chapter on veal and the several recipes for fois gras. The squeamish may omit his detailed instructions on how to bone a saddle of rabbit. The text concludes with offerings on sausage-making, pates and terrines, broths and consomme. Peterson is himself, at his best, an expert. He staged at Cordon Bleu in Paris. He owned Le Petit Robert in Greenwich Village. He taught for years at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. His cookbooks have won seven James Beard Awards. His writing is wry and funny and practical and the product of an immense amount of time in the kitchen. If I could only have twenty cookbooks on my shelf, surely four or five of them would be Peterson's, including this one.