The River Cottage Meat Book [Hardcover]

First the bit you would expect: tons of great recipes, covering both the more familiar cuts of meat (roasts, pies, casseroles) and weirder ones (innovative ways with liver, sweetbreads, brains and more). So far so good: a really solid meat cook-books

But now comes the good bit: the book is also a sensitive and educational exploration of why we should eat meat, how farm animals should be treated, and how to select meat so that it tastes good. The author argues passionately that it is both our moral and our culinary duty to buy good meat: animals that have been well treated taste better. He also includes a very well thought-out section on the ethics of meat-eating, which far from being the standard diatribe against vegetarians is subtle, educated and immensely convincing.

To top it all, the book is well written, beautifully designed and lvishly illustrated. What more could you ask from a cook book - oh, yes recipes! Well, those are excellent, reliable and oh-so tasty. He make's me re-think my hostility to TV-based food programmes. Hugh, you are a good thing indeed.

Most cookery books answer the "how?" questions with varying degrees of success but I suspect that after the third or fourth Recipe Collection Christmas Stocking-Filler, many people would like to have a few basic "why?" questions answered to satisfy the need to be able to improvise when ingredients (or even equipment) aren't available or simply to satisfy their creative urges.

The book is therefore split into two so that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall can first deal with what you should know about meat before he deals with how you can best cook it. HF-W's combination of concise facts about the meat industry and cutting - sometimes very comedic - observations will give any reader the armoury and terminology to be more intelligent about what they buy (how many people really have more than a rudimentary knowledge about which part of an animal provides which kind of meat and what it's good for?) but as he appears to agree himself, this book is only a starting point and you'll have to establish a good relationship with a good butcher to really get the best ingredients and the best use of what you do buy.

Once you do all this, the rewards are the recipes in the second half of the book. HF-W runs through a number of well-known meat dishes and as usual, some are more adventurous than others. His easy going style and his refreshing honesty about when "the right way" is simply his own opinion makes you realise how accessible good cooking and good ingredients actually are.