Dinner Plans: Easy Vintage Meals
By Jennifer Calihan and Adele Hite
Eat the Butter
The first page of Dinner Plans: Easy Vintage Meals advises us to get over our fear of fat and eat like our grandmothers ate. Saturated fat, cholesterol and salt did not kill them and won’t kill us. The authors of this book have noticed the obvious: “The low-fat dietary recommendations handed out by the ’experts’ back in the late 70s have been a miserable failure.” You will find life is much easier when you are not afraid of your food.
Shortly after that is a list of reasons to eat more “vintage” fat. That means saturated fat. Save money and skip the lean meat. Get fatty meat cuts. And lots of butter. Of course, you do want to skip the fake fats like margarine and any trans fats. Refined vegetable oils and shortening are only good for shortening your life.
The recipes feature things like chicken breast with butter and lemon, roasted carrots with olive oil and crème fraîche, pork chops with sour cream and apple, grilled steak with butter and herbs. . . a lot of things with butter or cream. A unique feature of this book is the recipe pages, which are horizontally cut into three sections with one recipe on each section. You can find a main dish recipe in the top section and then find a side dish recipe in the bottom two sections. The way the pages are cut allows you to see any combination of three recipes simultaneously.
I like the quote from Julia Child in the back: “If you’re afraid of butter, use cream.” Also near the end is another piece of advice—when in doubt, add butter and salt. Thumbs UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2018.
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