Serious Cookbook, Manic Pig

(Couldn't decide if this belonged on ILB or ILC, so I'm compromising and putting it here. It'a from today's NYT.)

December 13, 2006
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?

But because they made all the decisions, they could let a waiter, Tom Tassel, illustrate the book with cartoons that are more Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers than Food Network. One of Mr. Tassel’s creations is a manic pig with a missing foot (the pied de cochon), the wild-eyed sidekick to a scruffy cartoon version of Mr. Picard. The pig hobbles around with a glass of wine, falls in love with a roasted Guinea hen, sucks sap out of a maple tree and, next to a recipe for a cookie with an off-color name, loses consciousness under a nun’s habit.

The book includes a DVD with recipes and such not-ready-for-prime-time moments as a sound technician drinking Champagne from an empty maple syrup can.

“I wanted a cooking book that is like Pied de Cochon and for sure gets the spirit of that restaurant,” Mr. Picard said at a book party at the restaurant in October.

But it’s a serious cookbook, full of professional insights.

For instance, you learn that the broth for the onion soup is made with pork stock, lardons and the local rousse beer, then, as the night goes on, the restaurant uses it to blanch sausages and cured meats, and it becomes even more flavorful. And the pork loin in “La Coupe PDC” is seared in duck fat.

It’s also particularly Québécois, matching French culinary traditions with an avid hunting season. At the end of the recipe for venison tartare, for example, the “Note to Hunters” suggests that if you shoot your own deer you should age it for 8 to 10 days with the skin on, then trim off the tender cuts and eat those within 3 days. (The less sporting might do what the restaurant does and use farm-raised venison.)

The French version starts with a 48-page graphic novel that, according to Mr. Picard, is “the history of pork,” but they decided the humor was too Québécois to be translated.

The English version omits the novel and instead opens with an introduction by the chef and author Anthony Bourdain, in which he writes, “No one ‘gets’ or loves what Picard and his talented crew do at Au Pied de Cochon more — or enjoy more fully what he does — than his fellow professionals.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Bourdain said: “When you eat all the time, it’s a relief to go into a restaurant like this. It’s dogma-free and irony-free. If you’ve ever watched him cook, he absolutely means it. Seeing him back there with a bunch of happy chefs in dirty T-shirts, it brings that much more joy to the meal.”

The recipes are straightforward and hearty — pig trotter salad, foie gras poutine — but like the restaurant, they don’t cut corners.

Take the second instruction of “Beans and Meatballs,” a cassoulet-like stew with pork and white beans, which starts: “Using a saw, cut the top of the piglet skulls to remove the brains.”

The entry for the lobster roll begins with a recipe for a homemade hot dog bun and ends with a layer of foie gras sliced from a lobe that’s been salted, wrapped in a towel, and left to cure in the fridge overnight.

The second printing arrived on Canadian shelves in late November. (Books, about $52, are available at archambault.ca and restaurantaupieddecochon.ca).

There are no firm plans to distribute the book abroad, but Mr. Picard is open to bringing it to the United States, perhaps with a tour in the spirit of the restaurant.

“Maybe I come down and make some cooking,” he said on the night of the party. “What’s the city where they make illegal foie gras?” Chicago, he was told. “O.K., so maybe we take some foie gras, and we go there.”