Home Sausage Making, 4th Edition: From Fresh and Cooked to Smoked, Dried, and Cured: 100 Specialty Recipes

This fourth revised edition of Home Sausage Making by C.G Reavis and E. Battaglia is an excellent volume for any cook inclined to undertake the arduous task of making their own sausages. Sausage making is an art, and commercial sausage-makers keep their recipes and techniques a secret, yet with this volume you will be able to create your own. And even if you are not ambitious enough to make your own, this cookbook is useful for all sausage lovers for the many recipes you can try to cook with sausages. Though the book is excellent, cooks will be disappointed by the way the recipes are presented: the text is continuous, so for many recipes you will be inconveniently paging back and forth while following instructions. For the sausage-making section (divided according to the kind of meat), the illustrations are great, with many step-by-step presentations. Many useful sidebars give information such as how to make muslin casing or how the process of emulsification works. There are dozens of two-page supplements called “Meet the Makers.” These are about sausage-makers throughout the country who also give away little secrets from their trade. If you decide to undertake the elaborate sausage-making process, this cookbook is perfect.