To cure something is to change it into something that keeps. Steve McHugh built a restaurant on that idea and then wrote the book: 352 hardcover pages that teach you to make the ferment, the pickle, the jam, the spice blend or the smoke first, and then spend the rest of their length cooking with it. More than 150 recipes, and the publisher is explicit that they work with a jar you bought as well as a jar you filled.

The chapters are named for whatever is doing the preserving, and five of them are visible on the spreads photographed here. Four are printed as running heads on the pages themselves, Acid, Dry, Ferment and Smoke, and the fifth, Sugar, opens its own chapter on page 121. Each chapter starts with a Base Ingredient section that teaches the preserve itself. Base Ingredient: Pickles, on page 29, opens on what the restaurant pickles across a Texas growing season, from okra and green beans to watermelon rind and butternut squash, goes on to which vessels are safe to pickle in and why, and ends at a quart of cucumber pickles. Base Ingredient: Dried Spice Blends, on page 105, is a chart that builds a paprika, turmeric, chile powder or annatto blend up from a quarter cup of foundation spice.

Then the recipes cash it in, and they send you back through the book to do it. Hot Sauce-Brined Fried Chicken on page 267 wants the hot sauce from page 262 and the brine chapter on page 197. The Smoked Cheese Waldorf Salad Sandwich on page 301 wants the smoked cheese from page 299 and the whole grain mustard from page 19. Shaved Summer Squash Salad with Pesto and Pepitas on page 62 takes a third of a cup of the pesto from page 60. The Sugar chapter opens on page 121 with a tableful of jars in raking sunlight, several of them wearing the restaurant's own CURED label, and it covers canning them on page 328.

McHugh is a six-time James Beard Award nominee. He grew up on a farm in southern Wisconsin, cooked in New Orleans, and opened his restaurant Cured in San Antonio in December 2013. He came through lymphoma at thirty-three, and the philosophy that came out of it is the one the book runs on: buy the ingredient at its peak, change it so it keeps, and go on eating it all year. Written with Paula Forbes, a journalist, cookbook author and critic whose work has run in Texas Monthly, GQ, Food & Wine and Bon Appetit.

The cover makes the whole argument in one photograph. A full fillet sits under a thick crust of cracked pepper, seed and salt on a dark wooden board, with a bowl of diced pickles under pink onion slivers and chive batons, two small cups and a dish of coarse salt beside it. Hardcover, 352 pages, 7-3/8 by 9-1/8 in. Ten Speed Press, 26 March 2024. ISBN-13 9781984861467.

It shelves next to Cooking Meat: A Butcher's Guide, Kombucha Revolution, Sourdough: Recipes for Rustic Fermented Breads and That Cheese Plate Will Change Your Life.