The Complete Meat Cookbook: A Juicy and Authoritative Guide to Selecting, Seasoning and Cooking Today's Beef, Pork, Lamb and Veal [Hardcover]

Bruce Aidells (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 5, 1998

America is proudly falling in love again--with meat. Whether it's a grilled beefsteak, a succulent lamb chop, a juicy pork loin, or a well-seasoned veal shank, there's nothing like red meat. We're eating it with gusto--about twenty pounds more than we did a decade ago, according to the New York Times. In the past few years, more than one thousand new steak houses have opened. And because today's cuts are leaner than ever, they need special treatment and cooking techniques to make them flavorful, tender, and juicy. Now two colorful collaborators and Julia Child Award winners tell us everything we need to know about cooking meat. In The Complete Meat Cookbook, readers will find: --Straight talk on how to make sense of the bewildering variety of meats at the supermarket. The authors discuss their favorite cuts and provide tips on which butchers' favorites to request. --Advice on how to season with innovative techniques like dry rubs, wet marinades, brining, herb pastes, and fast sauces. -

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Frankly, we love meat." Thus spake Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly, their first words in The Complete Meat Cookbook. "This book," these well-informed authors tell us, "is written for those who share this carnivorous inclination." As the authors of Hot Links and Country Flavors, Real Beer and Good Eats, and Flying Sausages, these guys know meat. And their mission in life is to share what they know. With gusto.

The divisions are obvious: beef, pork, lamb, veal. But packed into each chapter is more information than any single reader might think possible. There's history and anthropology; there's anatomy and kitchen chemistry. And all of it is aimed at what the authors call the "new meat." It's a leaner product--less fat than ever before. So to get the succulence and the flavor that resides in memory (coming from a time of fattier cuts) sliced and onto the plate, today's cook has to use a different, more informed approach. You will find that guidance in this book. How to select and buy, how to prep, how to intensify the flavor, how to cook, how to store: it's all here. There is no other book like it.

Heavily illustrated, The Complete Meat Cookbook opens with a section on meat basics, including a little meat eating history and a terrific doneness chart. Then there's a long section covering all the basic cooking techniques and which cuts of which meat work best with each technique. Once the book breaks out into sections by kind of meat--beef, pork, lamb, veal--the depth of information focuses and intensifies, and the recipes roll right along for more than 600 pages.

Myth busting (like, don't salt meat before cooking, it will dry it out: wrong) is highlighted throughout the book. And each recipe is labeled for ease, speed, budget consciousness, serve to company, etc. The recipes take into account the world of meat eating. This is no Eurocentric text--it is, as the title proclaims, complete. If you are going to eat meat, do it right. This is the book to show you how. No cookbook bookshelf is complete without a copy of The Complete Meat Cookbook. --Schuyler Ingle

From Publishers Weekly

The leaner cuts of meat now on the market require extra attention to ensure they don't toughen and dry during preparation, and with that in mind Aidells?owner of Aidells Sausage Company?and Kelly (both coauthored Hot Links & Country Flavors and Flying Sausages) offer more than 230 recipes certain to attract meat-fanciers. They address how to buy meat, flavor it and cook it; specify the temperatures at which various meats should be cooked; and advise using a digital instant-read thermometer to check degrees. Recipes are identified as Fit for Company, In a Hurry, Cooking on a Budget, Great Leftovers and other categories, and they range from familiar?Philly Cheese Steaks, the Classic Hamburger and Grilled Lamb Chops?to nicely inventive: Braised Beef Shanks with Coconut Milk, Ginger and Cumin shows a Pacific Rim influence, while Sauteed Pork Chops with White Wine and Vanilla Sauce adds an even more unusual twist. Master recipes are followed by variations, as in the basic Roast Rack of Lamb and one flavored with Black Bean-Mustard Coating or a Fresh Herb Crust. Complete is a fit adjective for this highly recommended book. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 688 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (November 5, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395904927
• ISBN-13: 978-0395904923
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 7.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,000,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WELL DONE!, June 2, 2000

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Paco Calderón (Mexico City, Mexico) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Complete Meat Cookbook: A Juicy and Authoritative Guide to Selecting, Seasoning and Cooking Today's Beef, Pork, Lamb and Veal (Hardcover)

Everything -and I mean EVERYTHING- you need to know about meat: from where does it come from to how to carve it, this book is a complete marvel! Do not confuse it with any of those "barbecue bibles" that tell you stuff you either already know or couldn't care less (i.e. lots of no-brainer tips or cookout recipes for weekend grilling-chef dads). This is not a cookbook, this is a TREATISE (also very entertaining reading)!

This book is for experts, made by experts! It describes the animals, their meat, its flavors, textures and consistency, the cuts, their handling, the cooking techniques for each and everyone of them and, needless to say, some not-your-usual-dinner exotic international recipes that'll water your mouth (it even features "cochinita pibil"!).

Too bad it only covers beef, veal, pork and lamb! It should also include game! But ...nobody's perfect! All in all, A MUST!

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of two great meat cookbooks. Better of two on principles, August 10, 2005

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B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Meat Cookbook (Hardcover)

`The Complete Meat Cookbook' by leading meat authorities Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly is a wonderful reference cookbook for all and any foodies who really cook. The pair have written three other books, primarily on cured meats before issuing this general work.

One symptom of the depth of Aidells' authoritative knowledge of meat cookery is the fact that he singlehandedly changed a long standing attitude about cooking meat and using salt. The conventional wisdom was that salt on raw meat before cooking drew out moisture from the meat and made it dry. Aidells demonstrated that salting the surface of beef before searing greatly enhanced the flavor of the cooked meat. This event was quoted, without necessarily giving credit to Aidells himself, on more than a few Food Network shows, most notably by Sara Moulton and the culinary world has changed ever since. The stature of that demonstration may be measured by the fact that the combined efforts of Harold McGee and Alton Brown, both with major forums in books and TV shows for their opinions, have not been able to stamp out the myth that searing meat `seals in moisture'. The difference, of course, is that a good sear has other positive benefits, so the myth is an empty talking point and culinary declaimers have no reason to change their cant, since getting people to do something good, if even for the wrong reason, is beneficial in the long run. But enough of this rant on small matters.

The Aidells / Kelly book can and should be compared directly to a similar book by an equally prestigious pair of authors, Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, who published their book, `How to Cook Meat' two years later, so they would have the advantage of reading the Aidells / Kelly book. The two books, like almost everyone else in the professional culinary world, consider `meat' to be flesh from cows (beef from mature animals and veal from animals one year of age or less), pigs, and sheep (mutton from older animals and lamb from animals less than a year old). In truth, neither book really talks much about mutton, so the `big four' are beef, pork, lamb and veal.

Aidells/ Kelly is a bit longer in page count, but I suspect the two are about the same length, as Aidells/Kelly uses somewhat larger print and is a bit more generous with margins. Of the two, Aidells/Kelly spends much more space on talking about general cooking techniques while Schlesinger / Willoughby spends more time on individual recipes. What that means to me is that while Schlesinger / Willoughby is a better source for fast recipes to do a particular type of cooking, Aidells/Kelly gives a better overview of general cooking techniques and a better understanding of meat cooking in general. Aidells/Kelly also gives much more information on picking the right cut of meat for each recipe and for each cooking technique. As one reads a lot of different material on cooking and spends all too much time watching Alton Brown on the Food Network, one gradually learns that shoulder and rump cuts are good for braising and other slow wet cooking methods and rib and loin cuts are good for fast, dry heat cooking, but things can get a lot more complicated than that, especially when you add the the creativity of supermarket marketing types who give fancy labels to cuts of meat which may obscure the meat's source and quality.

Aidells / Kelly earn their title not by giving us every known meat cooking recipe under the sun. No book short of a multivolumed encyclopedia could do that. On the other hand, the authors do a good job of providing a pretty wide range of famous recipes. Among the beef recipes, for example, they give `beefsteak Florentine, the Philly cheese steak, barbecued beef ribs, and Italian-American meatballs. I was a bit disappointed that their `barbecue' recipe was really just grilled marinaded beef ribs with a sweet barbecue sauce.

Their claim to completeness comes from the depth of their information given before and between the recipes on general cooking techniques and how to make the best use of them. To enhance our experience in reading the book, the authors also throw in some short histories of how these three great animal families joined the human food chain and contributed to the improved health of herding tribes over the grain eaters.

The authors give us a lot of other nice little tools such as labels on recipes to indicate whether they are best for quick cooking, entertaining, economy, or high leftover value. The most valuable extra may be the level of detail they give to determining whether a cooked piece of meat is `done'.

The very best aspect of the book is the number of cross references given for correlating cuts of meat with cooking methods, brines, rubs, and marinades. I was initially just a little surprised at how simple their animal butchering diagram was, in that it divided the whole carcass into no more than a half dozen primals and spoke about these basic regions as if everything from the beef round could be treated the same. But they redeemed themselves as they developed their subject and gave much more detailed treatments of more finely differentiated cuts of meat.

I recommend this book very highly to anyone who enjoys reading about cooking. It is just a bit less useful to someone who simply wants a book they can grab now and then to find a new way to do pork chops of lamb shoulder. For that, the Schlesinger / Willoughy book may be slightly better, as their organization of recipes is great for fast reference.

51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An essential reference, December 27, 1999

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Jadepearl "geezer geek" (Wandering, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Meat Cookbook: A Juicy and Authoritative Guide to Selecting, Seasoning and Cooking Today's Beef, Pork, Lamb and Veal (Hardcover)

This book is worth every dime. It stands next to Madison's _Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone_. I have yet to come across a recipe that has failed me.

The information is clear and concise. The only flaw I would argue is that the recipes are not all pure basic recipes but use ingredients that the average cook of 30 years ago would not necessarily have possessed e.g., zinfandel. But if you read the information correctly a cook can figure out the basics by either reverse engineering or just plain doing (an assumption is made that you know it is okay to salt and pepper the meat).

The pot roast recipe alone is worth it and so is the knowledge of brining.

My only wish is that they, the authors, do a poultry book.

Speaking as a person who eats at the California Culinary Institute often I would argue that the meat recipes are better than at the academy. Once you read this book you will have a very discerning knowledge of meat at home and professionally.

Highly recommended.