A Fascination With the Sum of Its Parts

The ancient Greeks, Romans, Sumerians and Chinese all made sausage, and Amerindians made jerky and smoked fish. Preserved meats such as those, as well as the more elaborate pâtés and terrines that were developed in the Renaissance, are all considered charcuterie, a late-15th-century French term that distinguishes the meat preservers from the butchers.

The hog provides more parts for charcuterie than does any other animal. "The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating" is the title of London chef Fergus Henderson's trailblazing cookbook from 2004, but the phrase has become a sort of mantra for such chefs as Montreal's Martin Picard, New York's Mario Batali, and Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski of New Orleans.

No Eastern or Western European village is without its butcher and charcutier. The American cities and towns where Ukrainians, French, Germans, Spanish and Italians settled all had their neighborhood butchers and delis until very recently, when the younger generation chose not to continue the family trade in the face of ever-more-stringent federal rules and the unglamorous nature of butchering.

In the low country of South Carolina, where I grew up and where small-town butchers traditionally offered head cheese, liver pudding, mountain oysters and pig's feet alongside the ribs and hams, all four of the butchers who provided me with sausages and insights into the glories of the hog have closed up shop since my first book on the cooking of the area was published in 1992.

In Manhattan's East Village, traditional home of Ukrainian immigrants, Jerry Kurowyckyj was recently told by health inspectors that he may no longer display at room temperature the sausages that three generations have been making and selling in his family's 52-year-old shop.

"They're applying the same rules that were written for the major manufacturers to small, artisanal producers like me," he said. "But I do things exactly the way my grandfather did, and his grandfather before him. I've never heard of one person getting sick from a sausage made by one of us little guys."

Those rules include no meat storage between 42 and 170 degrees, even if the sausages have been fully cooked in a smoker, the way they are at Kurowyckyj's. "I spent several hours on the phone with scientists at Cornell, trying to find a way to make my kielbasa and kabanosy so that it's shelf-stable in the eyes of the USDA, but everything they told me to do would change the flavor of my product," he said. "I'm not a chemist."

For centuries people have eaten salted, air-dried meats without problems. But recent crackdowns -- possibly the result of a few isolated incidents in fast-food chains -- contradict the news that the USDA is now, ironically, allowing unrefrigerated charcuterie such as prosciutto from Italy, serrano from Spain and saucisson sec from France to be imported into the States. One step forward, one step back.

Of course, nothing stops serious home cooks from making their own, and several new books, as well as a handful of classics such as those by Jane Grigson and Bruce Aidells, will help you along. Coming in April from Phaidon is French chef Stéphane Reynaud's "Pork & Sons," which I helped edit. Reynaud's restaurant near Paris, Villa9trois, has an all-pork menu. Michigan chef Brian Polcyn teamed with veteran food writer Michael Ruhlman to produce the comprehensive "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing" (Norton, 2005), which explains all aspects, with careful attention to food safety measures.

It's true that you'll need a meat grinder, a terrine mold, a kitchen scale, a sausage stuffer, casings, a smoker and "pink salt" (a curing salt with nitrite) if you want to make all sorts of charcuterie, but no special skills are required.

In most major metropolitan areas and online, you can find just about any type of sausage or pâté you might want, as well as any exotic ingredient or cut of meat. You can also leave the charcuterie to the restaurateurs, who now offer tail-to-nose pig cookery in all its many forms. Many chefs are buying whole animals, hanging them for several days to cure, and preparing their own sausages and head cheese. At Acadiana in Penn Quarter, Chris Clime serves all manner of pork: braised Berkshire pork belly, classic Cajun sausages such as andouille.

Some chefs even admit to cheating a little, recalibrating the temperature on wine coolers so that their dry-cured meats and sausages can hang at 55 to 60 degrees, the way they do in the rest of the world. But I won't tell.

The truth is, making fresh sausage is easy and fun, and the best part is that you can truly season it to taste: by frying a little to see what it's like, then adding a little more pepper or fat or sage or garlic.

In my low country cookbook I included recipes for ham paste, lard, duck pâté, oyster sausages, country sausage, blood pudding, hog head stew, head cheese, country ham and duck breast hams. I guess I was ahead of the curve, but the book has remained in print for 15 years.