There are a bevy of great grilling cookbooks on the market these days, and no doubt more to come, with I’m guessing a great one or two to come forth focusing in particular on ancestral foods.
That said, the critical point of where you source proteins for the grill duly recognized, great grilling cookbooks don’t have to be ancestrally focused to be useful for us all. Many a great grilling chef (and cook) have trod the fascinating path of meat and heat before us, and left us a treasure trove of great recipes, tips, and tricks along the way.
I’m something of a cookbook collector from way back, one of the most used cookbooks in our family collection is in fact this one: License to Grill, written by acclaimed chef Chris Schlesinger and editorial genius John “Doc” Willoughby (1997). This is one that you’ll want to track down and read through if it’s not on your self today.That’s a pic of my own well-worn copy from the back porch last night, digging back through for a recipe component I couldn’t quite remember…
Chris Schlesinger is a renowned chef and restauranteur; he currently owns Back Eddy in Westport, MA, and formerly founded and managed the East Coast Grill and Jake and Earl’s Dixie BBQ, both in Cambridge. He’s written numerous cookbooks and has long been recognized as one of the true geniuses around the grill.
John Willoughby is the executive editor of Gourmet magazine, formerly of Cook’s Illustrated, prolific cookbook author, and graduate-level writing instructor at Harvard’s Radcliffe Seminars.
This is not the fanciest, prettiest cookbook you’ll find; there are just a few pages of images interspersed among the detailed and thoughtfully written recipes, each presented with a short story personalizing some aspect of the recipe or the food itself.
The cookbook itself is fairly classically organized, offering succinct but useful thoughts on fire and preparing food, along with set of recipes for appetizers, cooking on skewers, beef and pork, fish and other seafood, fowl, hobo pack cooking, extra-spicy offerings, low and slow genuine ‘Q, sides, condiments and sauces, and a few (non-ancestral!) desserts.
I’ll bet if you dig around you can find a well-preserved used copy of this one, as well as some of Schlesinger’s other nifty cookbook offerings.
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