Review of Home Sausage Making: From fresh and cooked to smoked, dried, and cured. 4th Edition. By Charles G. Reavis & Evelyn Battaglia. Storey Publishing. 2017. 367 pp. Reviewed by Janet Wallace
The first time, I took pigs to the abattoir, I surprised the butcher with my order. While my
customers wanted hams, pork chops and the regular cuts, I wanted bacon, pork loin and almost everything else ground up. And I wanted the extra fat from all the pigs I brought in. The reason? I love sausages.
The idea of making sausages seemed intimidating but I couldn’t swallow the idea of having a butcher add store-bought herbs, garlic salt with anti-caking agents, and who knows what else to my pork.
So, armed with the 3rd Edition of Home Sausage Making, I produced six types of sausages flavoured with herbs and garlic from my garden. Over the following years, I made hundreds of pounds of pork and mutton sausages following the book’s recipes and tips. When I stopped raising pigs, I gave the book to a farming friend and soon after, her pork, goat and lamb sausages became a huge hit at her farmers’ market. All of this is to say the 3rd Edition served me well.
The 4th Edition has been “completely revised and updated” and contains 120 new recipes. I got it because I want to return to making sausage even though I will need to buy meat from the farmers’ market. This edition is amazing with more than 100 recipes for sausages from around the world, such as Vietnamese pork and lemongrass sausage, Moroccan goat sausage, Fried chicken sausage, and Black bean and smoked corn sausage. Yes, a new addition to the book is vegetarian sausages – and many of the recipes sound great (even though I don’t consider them ‘real’ sausages). Beyond the traditional pork, beef and lamb recipes, the book also covers seafood, poultry and wild game sausages.
I particularly enjoyed reading the profiles of 22 sausage-makers (one Canadian, the others American). Full-time butchers, hobbyists, ranchers, hunters and even vegans provide their advice and insight into making delicious sausages. For cookbook junkies, the profiles transform the book from a collection of how-to advice and recipes to an interesting and fun reading experience.
The 4th Edition of Home Sausage Making is an invaluable guide to sausage-making for both first-timers and experienced producers. Whether you want to produce a few pounds of sausage now and then for home use or process your livestock into sausage for the farmers’ market, this is the book to have.