The other week, I was at a function where the cooking duties were divvied up between a handful of Ontario's best chefs, each of them helming a different dinner course. The cocktail hour was by far my favourite -- an over-the-top array of house-made charcuterie prepared by chef Michael Steh of Reds bistro and bar in Toronto. I asked Chef Steh how he thought up the recipes for the dozens of different cured and smoked meats, terrines, pates, preserves, mustards, and even pickled mini Ontario kiwis that I was mainlining. He explained that a bunch were family recipes passed down through the ages from his Slovenian lineage but that many others were culled then tweaked from a secret charcuterie website.

What was once the domain of peasant farmers is now taking centre stage on the menu as chefs embrace the bold new Old World of guancale, bresaola, salchichon and soppresetta. Salting, poaching, curing, smoking: Charcuterie -- the artisanal craft of giving new life to offcuts and offal, is fast becoming the hottest course at the county's top tables.

In the past few months I've had fantastic meals of little more than cheese and charcuterie at Bar Boulud in Manhattan, so too at Salt Tasting Room and Campagnolo, both in Vancouver. I've died and gone to heaven at Toronto's The Black Hoof, was reborn at Union and died again Nota Bene. There's a huge amount of care and control in the preparation of charcuterie and it's truly what great cooking is about: Making something out of nothing.

But as talented as these chefs are, most of them needed a little help. Steh says not only is the secret charcuterie website an amazing resource for recipes, but also a clearing house of information on where to source many of the hard-to-find ingredients and tools needed in the curing and smoking processes.

Sounds pretty cool right? A secret charcuterie website. I mean, how does that even happen? And it's just the type of thing that the experimental home cook would love to know about. So I launch into Nancy Drew mode.

"Can I please have the web address for that secret charcuterie website?" I casually ask Chef Steh.

"No," he answers. (Damn. He's on to me.) Secrets are fun, but I'm a professional. So I hatch a detailed plan to trick Chef Steh into giving up the name of the secret charcuterie website. I stop by Reds for a midday snack a couple of weeks later.

"Hi Chef." "Hi Amy."

"So, um, can I please have the address for that secret charcuterie website?"

"No."

"Please?" "No."

Well, there goes that plan. Still, the chef puts together a lovely charcuterie plate for me and we continue to chat as I nibble.

"When I was researching recipes for Reds, I had expanded past all that I could have done through books. I needed more inspiration," says Steh. "So I started searching around the Internet for more ideas." He was looking for different ideas from different countries: From Iranian to Saudi Arabian to German to Russian. "I really wanted to see how the art of preservation and charcuterie influenced each culture," he says. And that's when he ended up stumbling upon the secret charcuterie website. "The site is great because it's very organized. It's a collection of over 400 recipes that were tested by this one individual, but it was a collection that he created by using a database through sources collected on the Internet, as well as people emailing in and sharing their recipes from all over the world."