Ebook: Sausage: Recipes for Making and Cooking With Homemade Sausage

From Publishers Weekly

Clearly authored for those who prefer knowing how the sausage is made, Wise (_American Charcuterie_) writes with the gentility of a woman who owned and operated her own French-style charcuterie in Berkeley in the 1970s, and with the precision of an author of 12 previous books. Here she guides us through the making of a vast array of sausages that can either be shaped by hand or stuffed into casings. She also provides a variety of international recipes that incorporate the freshly made creations. Chapters are broken out by main ingredient, be it pork, beef, lamb, poultry, or seafood. There are even three vegetarian entries for the tofu, bulgur, and brown rice crowd. The classics are all accounted for, including a chorizo made with plenty of garlic for use in a black bean chili, and a basic lamb and rice sausage for stuffing grape leaves or bell peppers. Sweet Italian sausage, with fennel and thyme, is at the heart of a Pittsburgh-style sausage sandwich, while more exotic options include a Vietnamese-style beef meatball made with mint, cilantro, and Thai fish sauce. A gefilte fish recipe in a book with this title may strike some as culinarily sacrilegious, but Wise justifies the entry, simmers her ground white-fish dumplings in a broth of fish bones and heads, and explains that gefilte is actually the Yiddish word for stuffed. (May)
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From Booklist

America has always loved hot dogs and sandwich salami, but recent years have brought new appreciation of the vast universe of chopped meat that constitutes the sausage. Wise, whose Berkeley shop purveys all manner of these products, teaches that the home cook can conveniently produce a number of sausages withhout always falling back on commercially produced ones. She offers instruction in just about every sort of sausage. Lamb and beef sausages can be put to as many culinary uses as the dominant traditions of pork, and Wise presents even a few sausages of ground fish. Vegetarians appreciate sausage presented as Wise's bulgura balls with yogurt sauce. These internationally inclusive sausage recipes don't require the use of casings, and many recipes fall into the category of meatballs, croquettes, and patties. Aware that the process of smoking sausages goes beyond the abilities of most home cooks, Wise judiciously avoids this complex and challenging technique of preserving meat. --Mark Knoblauch