I’m so over being lectured by food writers to honor the seasons and stock up on sea salt and otherwise comport myself virtuously in the kitchen that it was a small thrill to come upon one whose mission is to make us eat fat. Eat fat! That’s a message I can get behind. In fact, Jennifer McLagan’s substantial and by no means unserious FAT: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes (Ten Speed, $32.50) makes the same argument Michael Pollan created a stir with earlier this year in his much talked-about “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”: that the craze for animal-fat substitutes has damaged our health. Fat, it turns out, is a lot like TV — nourishing as long as it’s not your whole diet. From time to time you should eat a little salad. (You can toss it with McLagan’s brown-butter or hot bacon dressing.)
In long chapters on butter (“worth it”), pork fat (“the king”), poultry fat (“versatile and good for you”) and beef and lamb fats (“overlooked but tasty”), the author furnishes information on rendering, deep and shallow frying, grating suet, preparing marrow and a host of similar topics, filling the book’s margins with fat-related anecdotes and lore. (“It was rumored that New York journalist A. J. Liebling used a piece of bacon as a bookmark.”) None of which would matter if her recipes weren’t brilliant. Most of them aren’t for neophytes, but they reward the effort.
McLagan’s slow-roasted pork belly (the same cut as bacon, but uncured) cooks on a bed of fennel and onions, saturating them with its juices; then they get mixed with cooked kale. The meat is crunchy on the outside, succulent within; the vegetables sing three-part harmony. A halibut fillet topped with sage leaves, wrapped in prosciutto and cooked on lemon slices grants every element its say, the prosciutto crisping into a salty foil for the fish.
Actually, this dish is easy. So is a smoky bacon-and-squash soup that, as a bonus, freezes well. McLagan’s brown-butter ice cream, on the other hand, is a real pain — you have to cook the butter (being very careful not to burn the milk solids), then make a custard, then let it rest overnight before you freeze it. But it may be the smoothest ice cream I’ve ever tasted. McLagan recommends topping it with her salted-butter caramel sauce — also a pain and unnecessary for the ice cream, though delicious on something else (like your finger). Her spice cookies substitute bacon fat for butter, a notion that may cause an unpleasant tickling in the back of your throat until you taste them: the salt sounds a blue note under the sugary ginger, cinnamon and cloves.
