No Bull

By Warren Rojas

The River Cottage Meat Book

According to animal rights groups, meat is murder. Renowned chef and author Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, however, seems to believe the real crime is our increasing disconnect from the meat we do eat.

Fearnley-Whittingstall opens the Americanized version of his “River Cottage Meat Book” with a deeply personal “meat manifesto” — a checklist designed to question the origin, handling and overall quality of the meat we consume. He describes the “contract of good husbandry” as the mutually beneficial arrangement that is supposed to be domestication, and skewers industrial farmers for failing to live up to their end of the bargain. (“In the end, cheap meat is a false economy. This is because meat is a food for which quantity is never a substitute for quality.”)

The tome includes graphic shots of proper slaughtering techniques, as well as illustrations indicating where traditional cuts of beef, lamb and pork come from on the animal. The author also shares more than 150 recipes that touch on worldwide influences, including steak and kidney pie, black pudding wontons, pork rillettes and spiced hot-smoked liver. Fearnley-Whittingstall also suggests that lamb is his favorite barbecue fare (“The powerful, slightly gamy taste of lamb collides beautifully with wood or charcoal smoke.”), and even walks you through proper spit roasting procedures.

“The River Cottage Meat Book.” Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Ten Speed Press, 544 pages, $40.

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