Le Pigeon: Cooking at the Dirty Bird

This debut cookbook from James Beard Rising Star Chef Gabriel Rucker features a serious yet playful collection of 150 recipes from his phenomenally popular Portland restaurant.

In the five years since Gabriel Rucker took the helm at Le Pigeon, he has catapulted from culinary school dropout to award-winning chef. Le Pigeon is offal-centric and meat-heavy, but by no means dogmatic, offering adventures into delicacies unknown along with the chance to order a vegetarian mustard greens quiche and a Miller High Life if that's what you're craving. In their first cookbook, Rucker and general manager/sommelier Andrew Fortgang celebrate high-low extremes in cooking, combining the wild and the refined in a unique and progressive style.

"Here's one for the flesh lovers. The first cookbook from Rucker, a James Beard Award winner and chef at Le Pigeon and Little Bird in Portland, Ore., has a lot of meat in it. But that won't surprise anyone acquainted with the restaurant that inspired this volume. Though it opens with a chapter entitled 'Lettuce and Such,' entries in this section include dirty potato salad (made with chicken livers), and mortadella, mustard greens, Swiss. Then there's an entire chapter dedicated to tongue, another to foie gras, another to 'Horns and Antlers', and so on. And there are, of course, several recipes for the titular pigeon, including a simple roasted pigeon, accompanied by a cartoonish diagram of how to truss a pigeon. But while there are definitely recipes that skew decadent (such as chicken-fried quail, eggos, foie gras maple syrup, and toasted foie gras and jelly), even some of the meatiest have balance: Pig's Foot, Watermelon, Fet, for example, and Pheasant, Shiitake, Umami, Mizuna. Irreverent prose also helps to keep things light. The dessert chapter (Choco, Tart, Profit) provides the perfect playful ending — and yes, it features meat, too, in the form of honey bacon apricot cornbread, maple ice cream and foie gras profiteroles. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Gabriel Rucker is the chef and co-owner of Le Pigeon and Little Bird. He worked at Paley's Place and The Gotham Building Tavern before moving to Le Pigeon.

Andrew Fortgang is the co-owner, general manager, and sommelier of Le Pigeon and Little Bird. Born and raised in New York, he worked at Gramercy Tavern, Jean-George, Aureole, and Craft before relocating to Portland.

Meredith Erickson has written for the New York Times, Elle, the National Post, and Lucky Peach. She has worked as an editor and production manager for various magazines, campaigns, and television programs and was editor of The Family Meal by Ferran Adria. She is also the coauthor of The Art of Living According to Joe Beef. She splits her time between Montreal and London.