I've had a chance to look at
Fat and
Bones by Jennifer McLagan now, but haven't made any recipes from them yet. They are both well worth getting, in my opinion, so long as the food tastes as good as it looks. They'd be especially useful for people who are interested in food but don't know where basic meat cuts come from, the properties of different types of fat, and so on. Lots of the recipes are paleo already or could be very easily adapted. There are recipes for baked goods, which are unsuitable of course, but they are a minority, or for example pies could be topped with something other than the pastry.
In
Fat, she starts with a chapter called
Butter: worth it. It tells you how to make clarified butter and ghee, lots of butter-based sauces, a few paleo-ish dishes (assuming you're using butter, of course) and more baked goods. I'm looking forward to trying some of the sauces and the butter chicken.
Pork fat: the king goes over types of pork fat, the benefits of baking and frying with lard, rendering, and some info about types of bacon and ham. I'm unlikely to use many of the recipes from this section as we don't eat much pork other than bacon, but I am planning on trying making fried chicken with lard, as she recommends.
Poultry fat: versatile and good for you goes into chicken, duck and goose fat, foie gras, rillettes, confit, and some simple recipes. One I plan to try is the vegetable cake, like Anna potatoes but made with other veges and duck fat - yum!
Beef and lamb fats: overlooked but tasty talks about suet, tallow, dripping and marrow. I found the most useful part of this section the marrow recipes - there are several ways of using them, including some intriguing marrow sauces I want to try.
Bones has lots of recipes for cooking stuff on the bone. This book is a bit different from the
Fat book. It has less basic information and more restaurant-style recipes. It talks about the benefits of cooking cuts on the bone, and has chapters about beef and veal, pork, lamb, poultry, fish and game. It also includes lots of info about making stock from bones. Overall the recipes are generally fiddlier than I'd make on a daily basis, but it would be a useful book to have to haul out for special occasions. It's inspired me to order a beef rib roast for Christmas this year.
Overall I think both books are useful for any paleo cook who has access to a good butcher. Not sure they'd be that useful if you only have access to supermarket meat, as most supermarket meat is boneless and fatless, and they don't often have less common cuts. Measurements are given both imperial and metric, which is good. If you don't go in for fancy recipes, the
Bones book is probably less useful.
I enjoyed the snippets of historical information, proverbs, etc that are scattered through the book. My favourite:
A miser and a fatted calf are useful only after death. (Yiddish)
