At the James Beard Awards on Sunday — the Oscars of food — fat was elevated. And not just as each guest lifted Debbie Gold’s cured bone marrow on mustard croutons with parsley and ramp to their lips, either.
The recipient of this years cookbook of the year award went to Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, written by Jennifer McLagan, published by Ten Speed Press, and edited by Clancy Drake.
I’ve yet to read the book through, but a cursory read at a cookbook store the other day was convincing enough: this is a book celebrating something we all love, but have been taught to fear.
The phobia of fat has been advanced by a series of diets, and fought by a select few. But the overwhelming cultural message has been clear: fat begets a short, sick life.
Not so, argues McLagan. Her celebration comes with a point — namely, that our fear of fat has pushed us to refined carbo-hydrates, transfats and other, poor substitutes. It hasn’t benefitted out health so much as deprived us of an understanding of the basic element of taste, and blinded us to the simple truth that animal fat can be healthy, and is essential to any balanced diet.
Swine aside, her message may be well-timed. Trends have swung against austerity and towards indulgence. When I left New York for Oxford, it was hard to find a dish that didn’t feature fatty pork belly. And now that I’m here, it’s clear that England hasn’t so much taken this message to heart, as it never abandoned fat in the first place. The bone marrow on toast at St John’s is celebrated not as an anomaly, after all, but as quintessentially English.
A recent spate of books all celebrate similar trends. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, by Fergus Henderson, the cook of St. John’s, is a guide to how to eat the whole beast, fearlessly. Pork and Sons, by Stephane Reynaud, is a similar celebration of swine. Mario Batali, and its profitable profligacy, have come to exemplify this celebration of the once banned fatty bits. Who, after all, has not read Bill Buford’s Heat and not wondered at the moment Batali laid prosciutto bianco — essentially fat, guised as prosciutto — on the tongues of Buford’s guests? For some, the thought is repulsive; for others, seductive in the extreme.
In this sense, the greatest strength of McLagan’s book may simple by its honesty. Who has not felt that animalistic response to the smell of bacon? Or to the smell of baked bread and cakes? Fat is an invitation to which we respond instinctually.
For this reason, I spent a large part of two years captivated by cooking duck — an animal so well endowed with fat that it needn’t be cooked in oil. A hot pan quickly fills the pan with fat rendered from the skin. I kept tupperware filled with goose and duck fat in my fridge for cooking eggs, pancakes and making pie crusts. The taste fat provides is deeper, and more fulfilling.
The award, in this sense, may not have been as brave as the book it celebrated. It honors a worthy book and pays tribute to a movement of those of us who love our fat. Both justify our consideration — right after we butter our toast.
See here for a complete list of winners.
Source: Originally published in The Oxford’s Omnivore, October, 23, 2009.