How to cook pig in French and English!

[lsanderson]

Serious Cookbook, Manic Pig
By OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT

MARTIN PICARD may be one of Canada’s most famous and respected chefs, but his name doesn’t appear on the cover of his new cookbook, “Au Pied de Cochon — The Album.” There was no bank-breaking advance, and no promotional tour. In fact, there wasn’t even a book deal.

Instead, Mr. Picard, the chef of Au Pied de Cochon, the cult Montreal restaurant, published the book himself, and had faith that a readership would find him.

Now he has a publishing phenomenon.

The book sold out its first press run of 6,000 copies (5,000 in French and 1,000 in English), three weeks after its release on Oct. 23.

The book was very much a collective effort of the whole restaurant, the reason the only name on the cover is Au Pied de Cochon’s, Mr. Picard said. He and his staff wrote it over two years on Mondays, when the restaurant is closed. That is also the day when they do their pickling and preserving, so they held editorial meetings while making enough cornichons and corn relish to last through the winter.

From the start they had an unconventional cookbook in mind, and self-publishing proved to be more liberating than limiting.

How else could they open the book with a photograph of Mr. Picard in a meat locker, slugging a split pig as if it’s a punching bag while his shirtless staff watches? Would a big publisher have let them include a picture of the barrel-chested Mr. Picard wearing nothing but a regal sash under the title “PDC Food Porn,” or a portrait of the dishwashers acknowledging their hard work, or a phone message from an unhappy diner with choice words for Mr. Picard? More

Recipe: Venison Tartare

Aboard the Truffle Truck, Some Sniffs Before the Sale
By MELISSA CLARK

FOR John Magazino, a baby-faced 37-year-old from Larchmont, N.Y., the unmarked white van in which he conducts his truffle business is a recent luxury.

When he started peddling the aromatic fungi to high-end restaurants a decade ago, he took the subway, darting between Nobu and Le Cirque on the 1 and the R trains.

Now he spends November and December at the mercy of holiday traffic as he hauls his wares, which have grown to include caviar, porcini and whatever costly, rarefied produce he can procure.

“The truck’s a lot slower, but the chefs love it because they can see what they’re getting before they buy,” he said one recent morning as he slipped into an illegal parking spot outside the kitchen door of Cru, in Greenwich Village. It was his first stop.

Mr. Magazino opened a plastic foam cooler and pulled out the truffles, which had been sorted by size. The smallest, called first choice, range from the size of chestnuts to the size of plums. The medium-size “extras” can be as large as a tangerine, and the big-daddy “supers” can be as big as a baby’s head, though that day they were closer to an avocado’s dimensions. More

Wines of The Times
With Such Enemies, Does Merlot Need Friends?
By ERIC ASIMOV

WHAT’S the best thing to happen to merlot in the last few years? Why, “Sideways,” the movie that so roundly trashed merlot while genuflecting before the new god of red wine, pinot noir.

The movie gave shape to an inchoate movement away from American merlot in the marketplace, and spoke the truth in caustic terms: namely that most merlot produced in the United States is not very good. As a result, the anti-merlot trend accelerated. Fewer people bought it, and producers bottled less of it. More

Recipe: Duck Breast With Quince Compote

The Old-Fashioned Secret of Holiday Treats?
By JULIA MOSKIN and KIM SEVERSON

Abbeville, La.

HERE in sugar cane country, cooks don’t always reach for the sugar bowl to add a little sweetness to a dish. Janice Bourgeois Macomber, who insists that even people she has just met call her Aunt Boo, adds a spoonful of amber-colored cane syrup to cut the acid in her court bouillion, a tomato sauce that she uses to simmer redfish. And for a quick dessert, she sloshes syrup over thickly buttered white bread, then folds it over to make what kids here call a “diaper sandwich.” More

Recipe: Louisiana Gingerbread (Stage Planks or Mule Bellies)
Recipe: Cane Syrup Cake (Gâteau de Sirop)