Need advice on a book

My wife is looking for a cookbook that details the butchering of different animals - fish, poultry, pork, beef, etc. Any ideas on something that has good illustrations and techniques for this?

Well, my Escoffier cookbook goes into great detail about how to slaughter a 300# sea turtle. It's pretty old school, from the early 1900's. It's a masterpiece of a cookbook though from one of the greastest chefs that ever lived, Auguste Escoffier. Actually there probably is more detail on the slaughter of other animals but the sea turtle stuck with me

Bob,

And how were you supposed to prepare said sea turtle? ( although I 'm guessing that's against the law now..)

Deb

Well, this is timely, coming fast on the heels of my note about critic Anthony Lane in the movies thread.... I'm just going to offer a longish section from Lane's review "Cookbooks" from his Nobody's Perfect, which, fortuitously, includes both Escoffier and a turtle:

There must be millions of other people who refuse to get up at dawn and mow the lawn for dinner [the reference here is a recipe that calls for lining a pan with fresh-cut grass]. This fellow feeling should be a comfort to me, yet somehow it makes no difference. Cooking, for all the apple-cheeked home-baked community spirit in which food writers try to enfold it, is essentially a solitary art -- or, at least, a guarantee of lonely distress. When your hollandaise is starting to curdle and you've tried the miraculous ice-cube trick and you've tried beating a fresh egg yolk and folding in the curdled stuff and the result still looks like the climactic scene of a David Cronenberg picture, it doesn't really help to know that someone is having the very same problem in Pittsburg. Your only friend, in fact, is that shelf of cookbooks just out of reach. Leaving the sauce to its own devices, you grab each volume in turn, frantic for advice, and make your fatal mistake: you start to read. Two yards away, the sauce is separating fast -- the lemon is pursing its lips, the eggs are halfway back to the fridge -- but you don't care. By now, determined to find out where you went wrong, and already dreaming of the perfect future sauce, you are deep into Georges Auguste Escoffier's recipe for hollandaise: "Remove the pan to the side of the stove or place it in a bain-marie." Well, which?

In the simple "or" reside both the delight and the frustration of the classic cookbook. It should ideally tell you almost everything but not all that you need to know, leaving a tiny crack of uncertainty that can become your own personal abyss. If any text counts as a classic, it is Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire, which was published in 1903. Escoffier was a colleague of Cesar Ritz, and a man of such pantry-stocking initiative that when Paris was besieged in the Pranco-Prussian War he fed the starving troops on zoo animals and stray pets. I eagerly scanned the Guide for pan-seared hartebeest or poodle mousse a la Fifi sauvage, but all I could find was this unflinching recipe for clear turtle soup:

"'To kill the turtle, lay it on its back at the edge of the table with the head hanging over the side. Take a double meat hook and place one hook into the upper jaw and suspend a sufficiently heavy weight in the hook at the other end so as to make the animal extend its neck....'

"It goes without saying that the flippers should be blanched, and that 'the green fat which is used for making the soup must be collected carefully.' But where, exactly, does this green fat come from? The author doesn't tell us. Somewhere between the carapace and the plastron, presumably, but I'm not sure that I really want to know....

"When Escoffier tells us to 'stud the fattened pullet with pieces of truffle and poach it in the usual manner,' he presumes that we habitually spend our weekends looking for pullets to fatten and that we can poach them in our sleep. Many readers are scared off by this assumption; I feel flattered and consoled by it, all the more so because I know it to be dead wrong. I am not a truffle stud, nor was meant to be. Yet I willingly dream myself into a time when you could 'quickly fry 10 blackbirds in hot butter' -- just because I relish the imaginative jump required to get there, not because I particularly want a blackbird-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich for my lunch.

"In other words, the great cookbooks are more like novels than like home-improvement manuals."

My wife is looking for a cookbook that details the butchering of different animals - fish, poultry, pork, beef, etc. Any ideas on something that has good illustrations and techniques for this?

The River Cottage Meat book is pretty much the definitive resource on any type of land-animal butchery, but you'd probably have to get another book for fish. (If you've ever seen Gordan Ramsey's "The F Word"; Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is who Gordon consults when raising turkeys and pigs in his backyard)

Any culinary textbook will give you a general guide to butchering and breakdown of any type of meat/fish.

the CIA's New Professional Chef and On Cooking are two good textbooks that'd cover all the bases (and then some).