Food writer and stylist Jennifer McLagan has just published a new book called “Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes” and Salon has the requisite promo tour interview with her today.
The book is both cookbook and essays, so for those of you who like to read cookbooks (and you know who you are) this offers quite a lot of substance, as befits the topic. The Salon interview I’ve linked to focuses in on McLagan’s contention that animal fat is not only NOT bad for you, it’s actually GOOD for you. Animal fats, she says, contain crucial fatty acids that help the body absorb vitamins, reduce cholesterol, and have disease-fighting properties. Vegetable fats, on the other hand, are the trans-fat-laden, indigestible death bombs that have become the staple of the American processed-food diet.
In the interview, McLagan singles out pork fat as the best all-around animal fat for general purpose cooking. It has the most neutral taste of the common animal fats and is suitable for tasks as disparate as making pie crust, filling sausage, adding texture and mouthfeel to cooked meats, or acting as the medium for deep frying. For once, Emeril Lagasse was right about something; pork fat does, indeed, rule.
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