Limited appeal in this healthy age
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For those liking to understand the skill of pork handling, this is a good book and a worthy reference material. However I have to agree with the previous review and comment on the advances in culinary expertise. For me the use of some ingredients and techniques is a little laboured if excessive and the pork swordery required renders this a book little limp. I've had a few sausages in my time and have to admit that these do taste really good but for this book it's very rare I'll lob out my pork these days. I have to say though that my neighbours really do enjoy my pork, especially on hot summers days on the barbecue so for those special days, I will make the effort and give the neighbours a good treat with some quality porking sausage.
So all in all good reference, if a little out-dated.
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Not as good as it could be
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This book is well informed and an excellent source of traditional French charcuterie recipes. However it only gets three stars for the following reasons. Firstly this edition suffers from sloppy editing. Some recipes and passages of text appear to have words and sentences missing which render those sections useless.
Secondly things have moved on in the use of salpetre and cure mixtures that are better covered in e.g. "Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing", particularly because we now recognise health implications in their use.
This book is good for reference but there are better books (see above) for the uninitiated
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Essential for home curing & charcuterie
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As smallholders we are always trying to maximise the use of our pigs when they meet with their fate. The River Cottage books helped at the start, but there is plenty more to be done - and with fantastic results. Grigson's book is informative (although you do have to read around each of the recipes, because they do not follow the conventional self-contained instructions. The reading around is not a hardship, and you will invariably find other hints/tips/wyas of processing the animal that distract you from your orignal thoughts).
There are recipes here for using all the pig - and, once you get over our pre-conceived ideas about what is edible, you will find a wide range of flavours opening up to you.
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Superb
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This book is superb: a real classic. It is an essential book for anyone interested in pork cookery.
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Best sausages you'll ever taste :-)
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This is an absolutely superb book, but I wouldn't have expected anything less from Jane Grigson. The background to the recipes makes it a joy to read, and the recipes are easy to follow and invariably delicious. Some of the recipes use ingredients which require an understanding butcher, but most are readily available - and when you've tried some of them (such as the magnificent saucisse de campagne and boudin noir), you'll never want to see the insipid supermarket versions again. The perfect introduction to French charcuterie!
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