HISTORY OF CHARCUTERIE

 

Charcuterie is everywhere around us, but most in America do not recognize it as such. Bacon, sausages, hams, pates, and terrines are all part of this great culinary specialty. In the world of cooking, charcuterie is in a class by itself.

Understanding that the historical roots of charcuterie reach hundreds of years back., and that the fundamental methods of charcuterie, naming and curing and preserving, reach all the way back to earliest civilization, makes us realize that this specialty is one of the most important kinds of cooking there is.

Derived from the French words for "flesh" (chair) and "cooked" (cuit), the term charcuterie was used to designate shops in fifteenth-century France that sold products made from pork, as well as from offal. The Romans who made standards of raising, killing, and cooking of pork points of law, regulating its production, were likely the first to turn pork butchery into a trade, but it was the French charcutier, who brought the greatest ingenuity to pig preparations. In the fifteenth century, charcutiers were not allowed to sell uncooked pork (though they could sell uncooked fat, which would be rendered into lard at home and used for cooking there), and so they created all manner of cooked (or salted and dried) dishes to be sold later-pates, rillettes, sausage, bacon, trotters, and head cheese. The charcutiers of the late fifteenth century, the time when first guilds were formed, were highly esteemed. These tradesmen in charge of pork butchering played a critical roll in maintaining the food supply in their town; charcuterie then meant cooking and preserving the meat for a community. Long before the Renaissance, and through the Industrial Age, societies, civilization depended on such preservative techniques. By the time of the French Revolution, nearly one hundred master charcutiers were plying their trade in the country's capital.

The history of charcuterie, in the sense of salting, smoking, and cooking to preserve, may date almost to the origins of Homo sapiens. It has been carried on in many forms through virtually every culture, and it has been one of the foundations of human survival in that it allowed societies to maintain a food surplus and therefore helped turn early peoples from nomads into clusters of homebodies. Sausage recipes date to before the golden age of ancient Greece. Even before that, the Egyptians were fattening geese for their livers-and possibly making the first pate de foie gras.

In fact, the need to preserve food may well have been what led us to cook it in the first place, and then only by accident. It's not unlikely that the ancestors of Homo sapiens hung surplus raw food over a fire to keep away bugs and animals. In the morning, they discovered that it was smoked hot, tender, and delicious.

Content Source: Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman & Brian Polcyn​