When it comes to American cooking, no chef-writer duo is more revered than Chef Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman. In their new cookbook, Meat Pies, they cover the fundamentals of meat, seafood, and vegetable concoctions topped with, enclosed in, or wrapped in dough. After teaching readers the basics of what they need to get started, including necessary equipment and the all-important moisture barrier (to avoid soggy crusts), Polcyn and Ruhlman divide their pies into neat categories:

+ Pot Pies

+ Hand-Raised Pies, designed to be eaten at room temperature

+ Rolled Raised Pies, in which the dough is wrapped around a filling and simply baked

+ Tarts and Galettes

+ Double-Crusted Pies

+ Turnovers

+ Vol-au-Vents, or mini tarts with filling added after baking

This structure allows the home cook to master the dough and form required for the recipes as written--and also encourages invention, creativity, and discovery. Most pies will pair well with a sauce; others will work with the recipes for all-purpose sides and condiments. Featured recipes range from a deeply comforting Beef Short Rib and Vegetable Pot Pie to an elegant Mediterranean Vegetable Pie wrapped in crispy dough to a Cumberland-Style Sausage Roll with origins that date back five hundred years. Modern preparations play with flavor without piling on the fat, as in The Best Mushroom Tart; a Fish Pot Pie topped with a potato crust; and the dramatic Chicken Sheet Pan Pie with bacon, roasted garlic, and fresh herbs.

Informed by Polcyn's decades of award-winning cooking and teaching, and brought to life by Ruhlman's engaging prose, Meat Pies presents an innovative and exciting guide to an ancient craft.

In Pâté, Confit, Rillette, Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman provide a comprehensive guide to the most elegant and accessible branch of the charcuterie tradition. There is arguably nothing richer and more flavorful than a slice of pâté de foie gras, especially when it's spread onto crusty bread. Anyone lucky enough to have been treated to a duck confit, poached and preserved in its own fat, or a pâté en croûte, knows they're impossible to resist.

And yet, pâtés, confits, rillettes, and similar dishes featured in this book were developed in the pursuit of frugality. Butchers who didn't want to waste a single piece of the animals they slaughtered could use these dishes to serve and preserve them. In so doing, they founded a tradition of culinary alchemy that transformed lowly cuts of meat into culinary gold.

Polcyn and Ruhlman begin with crucial instructions about how to control temperature and select your ingredients to ensure success, and quickly move on to master recipes, offering the fundamental ratios of fat, meat, and seasoning, which will allow chefs to easily make their own variations. The recipes that follow span traditional dishes and modern inventions, featuring a succulent chicken terrine embedded with sautéed mushrooms and flecked with bright green herbs; modern rillettes of shredded salmon and whitefish; classic confits of duck and goose; and a vegetarian layered potato terrine.

Pâté, Confit, Rillette is the book to reach for when a cook or chef intends to explore these timeless techniques, both the fundamentals and their nuances, and create exquisite food.