Cured: Slow Techniques for Flavouring Meat, Fish and Vegetables [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

To be fair, only 3/5 may be a little un-just.

I bought this to start myself on curing meats and a few fish. However the undertone of the entire book is that curing is now an obsolete art, replaced by fridge-freezers. There simply isn't enough information on how to preserve meat. e.g. Under the air-dried streaky bacon 'recipe' it just says the finished product 'keeps well.' I'm new to this and need to know exactly how long and how to test if its still good (streaky bacon is one of the only recipes which actually focus's on making the product last longer).

So I was quite upset with the purchase. Then, as I carried on reading, I realized that everything lost on the technical side is made up for on the inspiration side. The whole aim of the book is to take the old techniques of curing, salting, etc and use them as added flavor, not as a method of preserving. I actually found myself inspired by a lot of the things in their and was making potted pheasant and smoked duck breast in no time.

Summery: Not much good for preserving food but great for adding new, interesting flavors to your dishes.

If the book had been described more as a recipe book, than a curers book, I would give it 4/5.

Gary.

First, what's good about Cured? Wildsmith's enthusiasm is unmistakable. She pulls in good (sometimes great) recipes from across culinary cultures -- no parochialism here! And she pulls in many of her recipes from other excellent chefs and cookery writers, and is unafraid to share credit. If Cured was *only* the recipes, I'd give it four stars and a place on the "eccentric but good" shelf.

But it also pretends to be a guide to curing, and there it falls woefully, even dangerously, short, if you want to cure consistently and safely.

For example, "curing salt" (salt with sodium nitrate or sodium nitrite), an essential, if controversial, ingredient in curing, is given seven general sentences on page 16. The novice curer will find no advice about why curing salt might be needed for one curing project, but is optional for another, and how much to use (Tellingly, "curing salt" appears nowhere in the index -- neither does "salt," odd omissions in a curing book).

Indeed, Wildsmith approaches curing with a cavalier attitude throughout the book. Curing is complex physical and chemical process that requires attention to detail. Experienced curers know this, but the novice will be left in the wilderness. Her "smokehouse rules," for example, are a jumbled, vague hodgepodge of "smoking" *and* "salting guidelines, even though many smoked foods are not salted and vice versa. The list ends weakly, "Before you embark... read how the experts do it."

Sausage-making is barely looked into. Air-dried, fermented sausages are wholly ignored (a brief stab is made on page 90). And, yet, Wildsmith devotes considerable space to air-drying whole hams, a project far beyond the abilities of novice meat curers, for all sorts of biochemical reasons she never looks into. Realizing this, she meekly suggests we buy our own from a reputable butcher.

The book could have used an experienced editor. The table of contents is useless, and the index little better. Curing your own bacon, for example, a basic, easy "beginner" curing project, is covered on page 35, but neither contents nor index will tell you that. An editor probably would have ensured the phrases "melt-in-the-mouth" and "mouth-meltingly" would have been used only once or twice every 20 pages. And, a serious food editor would point out to Wildsmith that "barbecue" is in no way a "cured" meat and would have insisted on deleting these misplaced, though excellent, recipes.

If you have any experience making your own cured meats, you will learn nothing from this book. The occasional recipe might prove novel and interesting. If you are novice to curing meats, I strongly recommend any of the following as being far, far better introductions to the craft:

Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing
Home Smoking and Curing

or even Jane Grigson's aging but classic: Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery.

But give Cured a miss.

We purchased this "Cured" cooking book several months ago and have had problems with some of the recipes. The Carne Salsa turned out brown & very salty all the way through, unedible. The author prepared this meat again & admitted there was too much salt for the quantity of meat! Also tried the Pheasant wrapped in Bacon but some pieces were cooked & the pieces on the bone were raw near the bone! Again the author provided an explanation that it could have been due to her using a copper bottom dish & in her AGA. The author did state that she had not tested all the recipes in the book, they were not her own, which we found very unsatisfactory.