Pork & Sons - a review

Pork & Sons Stéphane Reynaud Phaidon, 2007 RRP: £24.95 Charming, eccentric, beautiful - and porky! Buy from Amazon.co.uk

Surely one of the most beautifully designed cookbooks of the year, Pork & Sons is winner of the French Cookbook of the Year 2006 and has now arrived in English here and in the US.  The book is nothing short of a love story - one man's love for the way of life that encompasses everything porcine.

High on the plateau of the Ardèche, we are introduced to the author's pig-killing friends - you can almost smell the Gauloises smoke rising from the wintery photos.  We also get to meet Reynaud's late Grandfather - the butcher - his Uncle and his pâté team - a merry bunch of armagnac swilling porcophiles if ever there was one.

The book is illustrated throughout with glorious earthy photos and quite charming cartoons depicting pigs in "interesting" situations.  All the chapter headings and recipe titles are handwritten.  What we get from this is a general feel of well being, of a rustic, back-to-basics approach to cooking, celebrating flavour and tradition - though Reynaud isn't afraid to break a few taboos.

Pork & Sons  contains some 150 recipes ranging from a  chapter on black pudding through to some fairly exquisite looking  'party' dishes (read 'restaurant style').  Interestingly, Reynaud isn't afraid to cross the codes - he matches Spanish chorizo with mozerella and basil or French ham with piquillo peppers, where Iberico ham would be the obvious choice. 

 

There are a number of recipes for the less used cuts (in the UK at least): trotters, ears and tails for example.  I'm particularly looking forward to having a go at the recipe for trotters with walnut oil (pictured above) - if anyone fancies a Saturday in Surry cooking trotters let me know! 

 

A Serious Reservation:

You've probably guessed by now - I've fallen in love with this book.  However, it does come with one very serious reservation:  There is a translation problem with the word 'fillet'.  

I was surprised to see that some recipes called for a fillet of pork weighing 1kg or more - with cooking times of an hour and a half.  In the UK at least, the 'fillet' cut of pork is also known as the tenderloin - a thin almost fatless piece of meat from beneath the loin.  Long cooking would destroy such a delicate cut.
After a bit of research (including Frances Bissell's very good but sadly out of print The Real Meat Cookbook and a chat with my favourite butcher), I've come to learn that the French 'fillet' (and it is a French word) refers to the boned-out loin and not the tenderloin.  It makes sense that the loin could be 1kg or more and require cooking of over an hour.  Where tenderloin is required, the book calls for 'fillet mignon' - or pieces cut from the tenderloin.

To my mind, this is a serious translation issue and one that should be addressed in future editions of the book. 

 

Reservation aside, I am glad to recommend this book highly - and I'm looking forward to cooking from it! 

Pork and Sons - Buy from Amazon.co.uk

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