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Having paired salt with smoke, we can move on to the sausage—namely, a combination of ingredients that are ground and then simply cooked or smoked in varying ways, with intriguing results. The sausage section, the fat midriff of the book, ends with the complex dried sausages in the style of the Italian salumeria. These—salami, soppressata, and the like—rely on a special kind of cooking, one that requires genuine craftsmanship. It’s one that reaches a kind of artisanal excellence that’s distinct from all other kinds of cooking. It’s a culinary specialty that in this country is in its infancy, an art that’s slowly emerging in some American restaurants.

From sausages, we move on to the pâté, which is extraordinary for its visual appeal and taste. A pâté or terrine is cool to make, to look at, to serve, and to eat. Yet pâtés and terrines, whether meat, fish, or vegetable, are one of the types of cooking that almost no one does at home anymore.

The last category here is another subspecialty of charcuterie, the cherished confit. And we conclude with a whole chapter on condiments and sauces to be paired with all of these items.

The recipes in this book, with a handful of exceptions, reflect Brian’s work as a chef and a teacher. While some are wholly his own, most have their roots in standard preparations that he has molded over the years to satisfy his own tastes and spirit. As we worked on this project, Brian would send the recipes to me in chef-speak. I rewrote them in the style we use here and tested many of them myself. If we didn’t like something (this condiment tastes too eggy, do we really need diced sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil here?), we’d discuss the recipe and retest it. And more recently, Brian has used the recipes as they are in this book in his class, further testing and refining them.

The recipes are written in the standard weights and volumes used in the United States, and we’ve also included metric equivalents. An ounce equals about 28 grams, but for the sake of consistency, we’ve hued to commonly accepted practical equivalents:

1⁄4 ounce = 7 grams

1⁄2 ounce = 15 grams

3⁄4 ounce = 20 grams

1 ounce = 25 grams

1 pound = 450 grams

5 pounds = 2.25 kilograms

1 teaspoon = 5 milliliters

1 tablespoon = 15 milliliters

1⁄4 cup = 60 milliliters

1⁄2 cup = 125 milliliters

1 cup = 250 milliliters

1 quart = 1 liter

The recipes range from basic to complex, but the two main charcuterie principles—meat emulsification and salt-curing, as well as what to do with the meat once it’s cured (cook it right away, hang it to dry, smoke it, preserve it in fat)—are easy to understand. And all else follows from these ideas.

We want to reiterate that while the techniques used here do not represent quick or casual cooking, they are not terribly complicated. We did not write this book for the restaurant cook. We believe that the techniques of charcuterie can be important and satisfying in any kitchen; and the fact that they are not well known or much used in home kitchens today is unfortunate. We conceived the book primarily for the home cook and the recipes (with the exception of the tricky, dry-cured sausages) are written for the home cook.

Using this Book: Notes about Tools and Ingredients

We recommend the following basic equipment specifically for this kind of cooking, but, except for the sausage stuffer, these are all-purpose players, useful to any cook.

• A 5- or 6-quart KitchenAid mixer with a grinder attachment. Invaluable in the kitchen generally, it is used here extensively for grinding and mixing meat. Alternatively, a hand-cranked grinder will suffice, and the meat can be mixed by hand.

• A standard food processor (11-cup/2.75-liter capacity or more).

• A digital scale, one of the most valuable kitchen tools any cook can own. Measuring ingredients by weight is indisputably the most accurate form of measuring. Diamond Crystal salt, for example, is flakier and lighter than Morton’s kosher salt, which is lighter than Baleine’s sea salt—so an ounce of each, by