Take a look on the menu of just about any popular restaurant in Asheville, and you’re sure to find some cured meats. Sausages, terrines, rillettes, and confits are becoming wildly popular for their beauty and their bold flavors.
All these items are forms of charcuterie, which is a French term for meats which have been preserved or further processed via salt, smoke, and/or dehydration. Many people consider charcuterie at the height of gourmet, but Meredith Leigh, author of The Ethical Meat Handbook: Complete Home Butchery, Charcuterie, and Cooking for the Conscious Omnivore, is on a mission to prove just how accessible the artisinal curing of meats can be for the everyday cook.
“At its root, charcuterie was the food of the poorest of the poor,” Leigh asserts. The salting, smoking, storing in fat, and other methods were developed as a way of making highly valuable, yet highly perishable meat products shelf-stable. And she adds, “the addition of charcuterie to the pantry ensured thrifty use of the whole animal. Given modern circumstances, these benefits remain the same, plus, it tastes great. It’s just pure, real food.”
On February 13th, Leigh will lead a five hour Charcuterie Intensive workshop for home cooks at Living Web Farms. Participants will learn proper ratios and math for charcuterie recipes, and get hands-on in the preparation of fresh sausages, organ-meat pates, headcheese, bacon, and even some salami. Gred Gross, a local science teacher and inventor, will join Leigh for a discussion and demonstration of building a home charcuterie chamber; basically, a modified refrigerator that keeps temperature and humidity ideal for meat curing.
“My greatest ideal is for twelve-year olds to be curing proscuitto in their closets, and Americans to be eating liver pates as readily as they eat potato salad, ” Leigh concludes. “If we can do this, we can save money, eat better, and show higher respect for living beings used for food.”
To attend the intensive, register by donation at www.livingwebfarms.org.