A one-stop seminar on smoked pig

WHAT IT IS: Essentially, no joke here, a real bible of all things smoked pig, an engrossing, affably rambling, borderline obsessive one-stop swine seminar, from the genealogy of Wilshire-cut bacon to an appreciation of the repulsive lardo (cured back fat from the chubbiest Italian oinkers), with two-dozen bacon-centric recipes you don't see every day (i.e. oyster and bacon pilau). That said, what we have here is a genuine discovery, not widely distributed (yet), the first major release from Zingerman's Press, the new publishing arm of Zingerman's Deli, an ever-expanding Ann Arbor, Mich., institution. (zingermanspress.com.)

PRAISE (AND QUIBBLES): Weinzweig, Zingerman's co-founder, has a conversational writing style so loose, the book unnecessarily sacrifices a bit of the authority you expect from someone knee-deep in pig parts. On the other hand, a lack of pretense is refreshing for a guy who knows the difference between bacon in central Kentucky and bacon in southwestern Kentucky. A handful of recipe photos wouldn't have hurt (the rare Californian dish hangtown fry, which has gorgeous shades of gray and brown, could use a reference point for the uninitiated), but the book's folksy design and left turns (such as the art of the bacon-wrapped saltine) amount to one of the more compulsively readable single-subject food histories we've come across.

WHY WE THINK YOU'LL LIKE IT: Because it's like a long fun conversation, and because bacon, for which Weinzweig makes a convincing case, has become "the olive oil of North America," its smoke as central to American flavors as olive oil is to the Mediterranean.

- Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune