Au Pied De Cochon: The Album: A Cookbook from the Celebrated Restaurant.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Martin Picard’s extravaganza is to cookbooks what the Cirque du Soleil is to the neighbourhood jungle gym. It takes gastronomy from the farrowing pen of a local pig farmer and the force-feeding funnel of a Quebec duck finisher to the improbable marriage of cloven hoof and breaded, boned foreleg stuffed with foie gras. The stages of this production (which looks in the end like little more than a gigantic corndog with a cloven terminus) are meticulously traced in graphic photographs and cartoons. If this effort is beyond both the psychic limits of the fastidious and the supply constraints of most cooks, the spectacle (like that served up by the Cirque) is riveting and well worth the cost of the book (or admission).

All members of the cast, from suppliers to dishwashers, are featured in text, photographs, and cartoons. The last are simply outrageous and uproarious, dismissive and subversive of everything that culinary puritans hold sacred. Swinging his way through the text is a peg-legged pig who has exchanged one of his hams for a crutch and a place in Picard’s version of hog heaven. Along the way he and his fellows illustrate recipes featuring such improbable offerings as Stuffed Pig’s Stomach, Foie Gras Poutine and Foie Gras Pizza, Duck in a Can, Sea Urchin Gonads in Their Shells, Maple Pigs’ Feet, and Maple Ice Cream with Cotton Candy. There is a section on the delights of blood sport, featuring Martin the Hunter and several intriguing recipes for choice parts of Bambi’s descendants: Pickled Venison Tongue (or Venison Tongue in Tarragon Sauce) and spare deer parts that might cohabit in a “Chinese Pie.” All in all Au Pied de Cochon is a grossly distended menu for the celebrated Montreal restaurant, a send-up of much that is politically correct in the culinary dialogue, and a delicious, richly illustrated literary romp.