One man's meat may be another man's poison, said Lucretius, Beaumont and Fletcher, and John Taylor, the "water poet." Not so, says this slender volume by John Drury, former columnist for the Chicago Daily News. Mr. Drury has concocted an enviable recipe of delectable (and digestible) morsels of ingredients such as the preservation of meats from Roman times onward, the folklore of the boar's head, the story of the sausage, the cattle tycoons of the old West, and the meateating habits of Americans, which include lamb in New York, veal in New Orleans, and bologna sausage from Detroit to Oklahoma City.
As a native Chicagoan, it is fitting that he should pay special tribute to the "Hog Butcher for the World" and to the demise of Packingtown. One of the best chapters, however, is on "inside meats" (liver, sweetbreads, tripe, kidneys, tongue, heart, and chitterlings). The latter, he states, may