Field Guide to Meat

March 28, 2005
What are variety meats? What differentiates a T-bone from a porterhouse steak? How do you store foie gras? How do you prepare ground veal? And what does head cheese taste like? This most useful of kitchen references answers all those burning questions and more, in clean, matter-of-fact text accompanied by catalogue-type color photographs of everything from beef rolls to rack of lamb and smoked turkey wings. Green (Field Guide to Produce
) covers beef, veal, pork, lamb, poultry and game birds, game and other domesticated meats (which includes rattlesnake and squirrel), and sausage and cured meats. Each compact chapter explains the various cuts available and gives instructions on choosing, storing and preparing. Home cooks will find Green's guidelines on how much to buy of a given product helpful, while professionals will appreciate her inclusion of North American Meat Producers, or NAMP, cut numbers and names. And all chefs will benefit from the listing of international names for each meat (e.g., beef cheeks are called guancia
in Italian, joue
in French and mejilla
or cachete
in Spanish).