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(More customer reviews)Fritz Sonnenschmidt is a Certified Master Chef, who joined the faculty of the Culinary Institute of America in 1968 and retired in 2002. He authored and edited the book, The Professional Art of Garde Manger, which has been a standard textbook for many decades. Michael Ruhlman memorably describes Sonnenschmidt as a master of the cold kitchen, "who is very nearly a perfect sphere," so presumably he has vast experience in eating charcuterie as well as preparing it.
Published by Delmar Cengage Learning, this book sets out to be a textbook for both the culinary student and the keen amateur. In the Preface, Sonnenschmidt declares "For some time now I have felt the need for a comprehensive and detailed book on preparing sausages, pâtés, aspics, and salsas the easy way, as my masters taught me."
If indeed it were "comprehensive and detailed," it would be worth the hefty $62 asking price. But the first five chapters, covering equipment, the raw materials, seasonings and cures, sausage casings, and the smoking of meats-all in less than 50 pages-are woefully inadequate.
Fortunately, the bulk of the book is taken up by recipes, and they almost redeem it.
As befits someone born and trained in Germany before he emigrated to the US, it has a boatload of German sausage recipes-Liverwurst (seven different kinds!), Pressack, Mettwurst, Onionwurst, Cervelat, Brotzeit, Land Jaeger, Bauernwurst, Frankfurters, Beerwurst, Leberkäse, Jaegerwurst, Knockwurst, Gelbwurst, and Bratwurst (which, for him, constitutes a whole category of sausages). I was particularly pleased to see him dedicate a whole chapter to Spreadable Raw Sausages, something all-too-rarely seen in this country. And then there are the pâtés and terrines, which are his specialty. He even includes a significant number of kosher recipes made without pork meat or pork fat.
My only disappointment with the recipes is that he does not provide more information about the products and ingredients. For example, he gives a couple recipes for boudin noir, but does not mention that an Asian grocery may be your only source for finding pig's blood in this country. For someone of his experience and reputation as a culinary historian, I'm sure he could have told us much more about the history and traditions of the various kinds of charcuterie instead of just leaving his readers with bare-bones recipes.
The weakest part of the book, technically, is his chapter on sliceable raw sausages, like salamis. Here, there seems to be a fair amount of confusion or misunderstanding about the maturation process for dry-cured sausages.
The second phase is the incubation or fermentation of sausages, and here he seems seriously confused. He writes, "Even though I do not use starter cultures (fermento), I recommend (especially to beginners), using lactic acids" (97). First of all, he does use Fermento in his recipes. Second of all, Fermento, despite its name, is not a starter culture or even a fermentation aid; it is merely a flavoring. This means that if you follow his recipes, as written, you are relying solely on bacteria strains naturally present in the meat (chiefly Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, and Staphylococcus) to produce a proper fermentation, which is iffy at best. At a time when a variety of cheap and reliable bacterial starter cultures are readily available, his procedure of taking raw, uninoculated meat and incubating it at 70ºF for one to two days (98), is not only highly unprofessional, but downright dangerous. Either follow his recipe and use the Fermento (to give a fermented flavor) and skip the incubation phase, or add a commercial bacteria culture to the recipe and incubate as directed.
All the faults I've pointed out are a small portion of the overall book, but they are unacceptable coming from a Master Chef, particularly when he has set out to provide "a comprehensive and detailed book" on the subject and the publisher has priced it accordingly. My final grade: 60 or three stars-not enough to pass the charcuterie section of the Master Chef exam.
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