The Carnivore Cookbook: Zero-Carb Recipes for People Who Really Love Animals
by Jessica Haggard
Many people have been duped into fearing meat, and the recent escalation of propaganda for the cow-antagonistic Green New Deal and fake meat products suggests that the duping continues. The Carnivore Cookbook offers a timely and refreshingly unapologetic antidote, pointing out how frail and weak consumers have become through animal food avoidance and overconsumption of soy. Animal foods, Haggard reminds us, are “the one group of foods that is absolutely necessary for human health and survival.” The brief but helpful introduction includes tips on meat quality, underappreciated cuts, essential kitchen tools and ways to obtain meat inexpensively, with pertinent sidebar quotes from the Bible, lapsed vegans and artisan butchers as well as notables such as Fergus Henderson of nose-to-tail eating fame. One interesting sidebar discusses the uses of donkey fat. Following the introduction, the recipes cover fats and sauces, eggs, seafood and various meats, including raw meat dishes and organ meats. This basic book is not for the highly experienced or gourmet cook—most of the “zero-carb” recipes (with no grains and barely any vegetables to be found) include just three to five ingredients each and rely heavily on bacon and cheese to add flavor and texture. However, the roughly two-hundred page volume would be well suited to helping a former vegetarian or inexperienced cook learn how to render fat, make a basic cream sauce or bone broth or get comfortable preparing a variety of different animal foods in simple but palatable ways. One quibble: the cover photo features steaks with all the fat trimmed off, and while the fats chapter includes traditional fats such as lard, tallow and ghee, Haggard says nothing in the introduction about the central importance of animal fats or about the risks of overconsuming muscle meats.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2019
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Sounds like it would be good for our adult children who aren’t educated in our ways in the kitchen…….yet.