Primal Cuts: Cooking with America's Best Butchers

by Marissa Guggiana, Alice Wong (Editor), Katrina Fried (Editor)

Butchery was nearly a dead art, until a recent renaissance turned progressive meat cutters into culinary cult idols. Inspired by a locally driven, nose-to-tail approach to butchery, this new wave of meat mavens is redefining the way we buy and cook our beef, pork, fowl, and game. The momentum of this revived butcher-love has created a carnivorous frenzy, pulling a new generation of home cooks straight into the kitchen— Primal Cooking with America’s Best Butchers is their modern meat bible.

Marissa Guggiana, food activist, writer, and fourth generation meat purveyor, traveled the country to discover 50 of our most gifted butchers and share their favorite dishes, personal stories, and cooking techniques. From the Michelin star chef to the small farmer who raises free-range animals—butchers are the guide for this unique visual cookbook, packed with tons of their most prized recipes and good old-fashioned know-how. Readers will learn how to cook conventional and unconventional meat cuts, how to talk to their local butcher, and even how to source and buy their own whole animals for their home freezer. Much more than just a cookbook, Primal Cuts is a revealing look into the lives, philosophy, and work of true food artisans, all bound by a common respect for the food they produce and an absolute love for what they do.

• 50 Profiles and Portraits of America’s Best Butchers
• 100 Meat Recipes for the Home Cook
• Practical Advice on Techniques and Tools
• Hundreds of Diagrams, Illustrations, and Photos
• Home Butchering How-To
• Tons of Trade Secrets

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2010

About the author

Marissa Guggiana is the author of Primal Cuts: Cooking With America's Best Butchers (Welcome Books, October 2010), president of Sonoma Direct, a family business providing sustainably raised meats, the co-founder of Secret Eating Society, and a leader in Slow Food, for which she was the charcuterie curator at the inaugural Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco. A regular contributor to Saveur.com, since 2008 Marissa has been the co-editor and contributor to Meatpaper, a quarterly magazine exploring the fleischgeist. Marissa is committed to changing the food system to maintain the strength and independence of small farms and ranches. She is a fellow with Roots of Change, an organization to create a sustainable food system as the new mainstream. She also sits on the board of Ag Innovations Network, an NGO that facilitates communication for the stakeholders in regional food systems.
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Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Maggie]

Nice profiles of butchers and meat farmers.

[Yoyodyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Filled with excellent stories of small farm producers, butchers and people who work with animals for food production - this book is filled with people who genuinely care about where their food comes from and how it is handled. Food IMHO should not be anonymous and unidentifiable under cellophane. Equally, food should not just be the "safe and unrecognizable" parts of an animal. It was a very educational read and also comes with a lot of great recipes for items I normally might not have tried to cook with. Highly recommend for the educational components and getting some knowledge of local butchers and farmers alone.