Bruce Aidells was, for a while, the Michael Jackson of sausage -- not only a practitioner but an evangelist of artisinal charcuterie. He's since gone somewhat mainstream; you can buy his stuff in supermarkets, and there's far too much "low fat" poultry-based forcemeat in his formulary than there should be. But he and co-writer Denis Kelly have at least written a good first book on sausage making, cooking, and eating.

If you want to start out gently with making sausages, Aidells' book is a good place to start. He makes the point, several times, that you don't need to grind things yourself, stuff links yourself, or own as complicated and dangerous a device as a smoker, just to "make sausage." Many of the ingredients can be purchased already ground (how hard is it to find ground beef, after all?). And most real butcher shops (I said real butcher shops, not the meat counter at Shrubb's Superette or the local Uggly Wuggly) will grind other things for you; hell, my butcher once boned and ground a rabbit for me, mostly out of curiosity over what on earth I wanted ground rabbit for. You don't have to stuff sausage into casings, either, if you're happy with patties. And many, many fine sausage formulations are cooked and eaten "fresh" -- meaning not preserved at all, except in your fridge or freezer. All of this is pointed out (with less attitude than here) in Aidel's book.

If you do want to perform some of the fabrication, he tells you in reasonable detail how to do it, although the book is light (to the point of non-existence) on illustrations of technique. The photos are exclusively of dishes made with sausage, whereas something as potentially tricky as tying off links is dismissed with a sentence or two of text.

Don't want to mess with making the sausage at all?. No problem. The whole second half of the book is just recipes that use sausage in dishes. Many of them are unsurprising; putting ground up meat of some kind in an empanada isn't all that astonishing. Others are a birt further off the beaten path -- at least my path: "Winter vegetable, sausage, and chestnut soup," for example. But most are worth a shot, especially in the grim, gray, winter months.

In fine: perfectly readable, mostly usable book on the whole subject of sausage. If you want a place to begin, you could do much worse.

CII Rates: Bruce Aidell's Complete Sausage Book
Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly
2000, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA
ISBN: 1-58008-159-2

	Usefulness	Very useful. In fact only the lack of technique illustrations keeps it from getting three knives.
	Accuracy	Couldn't find a thing to quibble with -- written when it was (2000), it can be forgiven the emphasis on low fat.
	Snobbery	Aidells has lost his cachet -- when every megamart in the midwest markets your meat, you can't claim much in the way of snob appeal.