Gaslight Brasserie du Coin makes its own charcuterie.
Photo: Ameena Langford
Charcuterie – housemade pâtés, sausages and terrines – is often the province of specialty producers or restaurants focused on meat. The Butcher Shop in the South End, for example, sells more than a half-dozen items retail. Other usual suspects include Tony Maws’ Craigie on Main, where housemade sausage and terrines are de rigueur, and Aquitaine and Gaslight Brasserie du Coin, both of which provide their own charcuterie.
This fall, however, even more chefs are championing charcuterie as not only a form of culinary expression, but as a way to maintain sustainable cuisine by using the whole animal. “When you bring in a whole lamb, it's easy to sell the ribs and loin,
[but] then you’re left with the rest of it,” says Richmond Edes, executive chef of Gibbet Hill Grill in Groton. The bucolic restaurant, set on its own farm, currently serves a
merguez lamb sausage (as part of a short-loin lamb dish) and a homemade
pork sausage (in a rigatoni dish), and Edes hopes to offer more in the future:
“We’re trying to build a program where we have it more prominently on the menu.”
Mary Dumont, executive chef at Harvest in Harvard Square, has been hot on charcuterie since she started there in 2007. “One of the most unique things that I make is the tuna bacon,” said Dumont via e-mail. “It’s brined in brown sugar and molasses and spices, then smoked in-house.” Other eateries offering similar fare include 51 Lincoln in Newton, where the menu includes dried cranberry pork terrine, beef salami and smoked pork salami, and Coda in South End, which has a rotating housemade charcuterie plate, complete with its own housemade pickles. Now all you need are housemade toothpicks.
– Naomi Kooker