The Brisket BookA Love Story With Recipes

Website: The Brisket Book

Food writer, cookbook author, and brisket zealot Stephanie Pierson contends, “Some foods will improve your meal, your mood, your day, your buttered noodles. Brisket will improve your life.”

Brisket is so easy to warm up to, no wonder everyone loves it. Families pass brisket recipes down like heirlooms. Chat rooms are full of passionate foodies giving passionate opinions about their briskets—and each one claims to have the best brisket recipe ever! When Angel Stadium of Anaheim introduced a BBQ brisket sandwich, it promptly won a national contest for best ballpark cuisine. This lively book offers everything from brisket cooking tips to chef interviews to butcher wisdom. Color photographs, illustrations, and graphics ensure that brisket has never looked better. The recipes include something for everyone: Beef Brisket with Fresh Tangy Peaches, Scandinavian Aquavit Brisket, Sweet-and-Sour Brisket, Barbecued Brisket Sandwiches with Firecracker Sauce, a Seitan Brisket (even people who don’t like meat love brisket), and a 100% Foolproof Bride’s Brisket.

If brisket does indeed improve your life, then The Brisket Book promises to be the ultimate life-affirming resource for anyone who has savored—or should savor—this succulent comfort food.

Stephanie Pierson is an author and journalist who writes about food, design, and lifestyle issues. She is a regular contributor to The Atlantic Monthly Food Site. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Saveur, Metropolitan Home, and EatingWell. She is the author of a dozen books, including Vegetables Rock!, and has ghost-written five cookbooks.

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“Stephanie Pierson wants to knock pork off its pedestal, and THE BRISKET BOOK: A Love Story With Recipes (Andrews McMeel, $29.99) even has a flirtatious heifer on the cover. Pierson, a funny writer (and contributor to the food coverage at TheAtlantic.com), clears up the heifer-steer distinction and many others, but mostly gives many recipes and techniques, going to the experts — a long day with Christopher Kimball for a perfectionist brisket — to help explain how “a flaccid four-pound, gray-brown piece of beef, shaped roughly like the state of Tennessee” can “inspire Proustian prose, evoke the deepest pleasure, create indelible memories.” The answer, of course, is that everyone grew up eating it and it’s easy to cook. “With some food,” a friend of hers says, “there’s a right way and a wrong way. With brisket there’s only ‘my way.’ ”” ––The New York Times

“It is a cookbook. There are recipes here – 30 of them, in fact — many of which are curious innovations to the tried-and-true barbecued brisket, Jewish roast beef, or corned beef. But mostly, it is not a cookbook. It is, however, a collection of everything you can possibly brainstorm related to all things brisket. … But, the meat of any cookbook (pun intended) is the recipes therein, and Pierson has gone straight to the experts for her tidy collection of the same. The all-star list of beef wranglers who offer traditional and newfangled brisket recipes includes restaurateur John Besh (smoky New Orleans brisket), NYC’s Kitchen Arts & Letters bookshop owner Nach Waxman (Jewish brisket), Bill Niman of Niman Ranch (“branding brisket”), Chris Kimball of Cooks Illustrated (onion-braised brisket), and Jewish cooking maven Joan Nathan (brisket with ginger, orange peel, and tomato). Other recipes describe outré dishes like brisket in tahini, Cuban Creole stew, brisket noodle soup with Korean chile, and a “brisket burger.”” ––Stlmag.com

“Subtitled “A Love Story with Recipes” this collection of recipes and observations is so much more than that – it’s an enthusiastic guide to the best in briskets, rich and juicy with recipes, stories, humor and tips. … Brisket reigns supreme in this 208 page volume enlivened with dozens of photographs and illustrations. With this book author/journalist Stephanie Pierson has brought us the first and only book entirely devoted to brisket, and she’s done it with rare attention to details plus robust good humor. Enjoy!” ––Devine Caroline

“Stephanie Pierson doesn’t just love brisket. As Woody Allen would say she lrrrrrrvs it. She loves brisket so much it takes her almost 17 pages of clever brisket pontification in her new cookbook, “The Brisket Book: A Love Story With Recipes,”  before we get a glimpse of our very first recipe. … The Brisket Book is a cute book with more schtick than a Catskill comedian. And on page 90 we get our first real recipe! By now we know everything there is to know about the lowly brisket. It’s history. It’s location on the cow (sorry to my vegetarian friends). How to buy it. How to cook it. How to cut it. Tools. And rubs. And brines. And we’ve even been treated to a shot of man’s naked butt! … I did enjoy reading the recipes and looking for one that I could cook given my limitations at the time. Firstly, it was Yom Kippur and I wanted to make something that would cook all day while I was at Temple and be ready when I got home. Secondly, my oven is broken so I was going to have to use a crockpot (we put it on the deck so the smell wouldn’t tempt our fasting family). And lastly I didn’t want to sort through a lot of ingredients first thing in the morning before cooking the brisket. So I picked “Slow Cooker Brisket”. … I have to say this is one of the best versions I’ve done. It turned out perfectly! I recommend it.” ––TCJewfolk.com