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By Root 372 0

could sell uncooked fat, which would be rendered into lard at home and used for cooking there), and so they created all manner of cooked (or salted and dried) dishes to be sold later—pâtés, rillettes, sausages, bacon, trotters, head cheese. The charcutiers of the late fifteenth century, the time when the first guilds were formed, were highly esteemed. These tradesmen in charge of pork butchering played a critical role in maintaining the food supply in their towns; charcuterie then meant cooking and preserving the meat for a community. Long before the Renaissance, and through the Industrial Age, societies, civilization depended on such preservative techniques. By the time of the French Revolution, nearly one hundred master charcutiers were plying their trade in the country’s capital.

The history of charcuterie, in the sense of salting, smoking, and cooking to preserve, may date almost to the origins of Homo sapiens. It has been carried on in many forms through virtually every culture, and it has been one of the foundations of human survival in that it allowed societies to maintain a food surplus and therefore helped turn early peoples from nomads into clusters of homebodies. Sausage recipes date to before the golden age of ancient Greece. Even before that, the Egyptians were fattening geese for their livers—and possibly making the first pâté de foie gras.

In fact, the need to preserve food may well have been what led us to cook it in the first place, and then only by accident. It’s not unlikely that the ancestors of Homo sapiens hung surplus raw food over a fire to keep away bugs and animals. In the morning, they discovered that it was smoked hot, tender, and delicious.

Other historians have suggested that our ancestors first discovered cooked food in the form of animals that had perished in forest fires, and then began to cook food on purpose. Regardless of how they discovered cooking, they surely realized that cooking made food not only taste good but last longer.

At about the time my fascination with confit, and then preservation techniques generally, plateaued, I met Brian Polcyn, chef of Five Lakes Grill in Milford, Michigan, about forty-five miles west of Detroit. I’d just finished a year’s study at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, in order to write a book about how one learns to cook professionally. I was green, but I’d learned the core cooking fundamentals and was eager to know more about the profession. I finagled a magazine assignment that allowed me to return to the CIA to observe the Certified Master Chef Exam, a ten-day marathon of cooking in all kinds of styles—classical French, traditional Asian, regional American, nutritional, patisserie—all fiercely graded. There was something insane about the test and those who took it, but by then I’d learned that insanity can sometimes more than adequately describe a chef. Imagine performing ten Iron Chef competitions back to back every day for ten days. The test is given by the American Culinary Federation at the Culinary Institute about once every year; that particular test in the spring of 1997 included a total of seven chefs, Brian among them.

Covering the test, I gravitated toward and spent the most time with Brian because he was unfailingly articulate and so he made for both good copy and a good education; also, as he was on the verge of passing until the very end, his story was dramatic. Incidentally, he was expert in the specialty called charcuterie.

The judges graded the participants’ pâtés and terrines, the backbone of charcuterie, on two separate sections of the test, but mastery of charcuterie principles was useful throughout the exam. What to do with a pound of scallops, for example, in the mystery basket—a form of cooking test in which chefs must cook a complete meal using a tricky, limited selection of ingredients—but make a mousseline? Then perhaps use that rabbit trim and pork shoulder to make a sausage? This was not by accident. It’s not difficult to roast a rack of lamb and make it taste good, but to transform scraps into