Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats

This cookbook offers a way of food preparation to aspire to but never reach. It offers simple preparation tips and is filled with interesting tid-bits about the history of cooking and diets. I recommend this book to everyone on earth.

If you care about your own health, GET THIS BOOK! It is a valuable resource of info on not just recipes, but also there are so many exerpts from other books and journals on the subject of food and its link to health.

I started eliminating sugar from my diet, and my health has improved a lot. I had been getting symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis, but after eliminating refined sugar and flour from my diet and drinking raw milk, the symptoms have gone! My wrist joint had been swollen and very painful, I couldn't even lift my son because it hurt so much. After kicking the sugar habit (you have to read labels, that junk is in almost every processed food), I started feeling so much better, and after a few months my joint is back to normal, the swelling went down and it has not come back, even if the weather gets cold!

This is one book I recommend to all my family and friends.

The only thing I had to modify were some recipes. Like with the pancake recipe, when I followed it exactly my pancakes were too runny, more like crepes. I just added a bit more flour and that solved the problem. I made the breakfast pastries, but they didn't rise and they turned into flat crumbly cookies. Other than that, the other recipes I tried were great!

I also have stronger teeth, I had gotten a tooth abscess and it was infected (it was throbbing and there was a swelling under my gum). I was scared to go to the dentist, so I took 3 cloves of garlic, minced them, put them in broth and simmered them for only a minute, then ate it all. I did this for about 3 days and it stopped the infection. To get rid of the abscess you have to get a cotton ball, wet it and dip it in baking soda/salt, then put it against the abscess under your gum. That will eventually pop the abscess. I then started drinking raw milk and stopped eating sugar and my tooth is getting a lot better! It used to feel 'loose' in my mouth and I couldn't bite down on that side for the longest time. Now I am using that side of my mouth to chew and it feels stronger already.

I made the raw salmon salad (using lemon and lime juice to 'cook' it) and it was excellent! It tasted like it was cooked, but it retained the vitamin B6 by not heat treating it. Once I can get some organic beef, I'm going to try kibbeh or steak tartare. Awesome book!! I can't recommend it enough.

This cookbook has faults, some of which have been accurately described by reviewers here, and certainly a busy single person like me cannot spend the hours in the kitchen which it would take to derive all his nutrition from these recipes. However simply by using this book once in a while I have improved not only my enjoyment of cooking and eating but also my health. After pancakes and muffins that are made by soaking the flour in yogurt first, after soups made from these broths, after make real fermented foods a part of one's diet, one will find it very hard to go back to eating any other way. Not only this, but for me this book was the beginning of serious thinking about how we live and how nature and culture can work together--with food only the starting point.

The biggest problem for me was the amount of advanced planning this book requires. It is not fun to start a dish and then realise that something needs to be soaked twnty-four hours before being used. But once one gets accustomed to advanced planning--simply deciding the night before what one wants the next day and taking the requisite steps--it becomes easy and natural and in the end saves energy as, when one begins to cook, much of the work has already been done.

As an education, as a way of having fun (really!), as a new and better way of understanding life, as a key to health and as a source of delicious recipes, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

The pot roast recipe is excellent. I have made it twice and I've never made pot roast before. It is brined overnight in buttermilk - I marinated it for three nights- and it was fall-apart tender. My boss and my roommate who were both raised on pot roast loved it, but didnt know about the buttermilk method.

Also great suggestions for how to use up raw cream. The whey recipes are great- esp for anyone looking for how to use raw milk up. I think this is her strength.

However I am not a big fan of her nontraditional methods, which she applies to all non-European recipes. If you can't be be bothered in presenting authentic recipes representing ancient traditions easily found in immigrant homes across America, then don't attempt it or it damages credibility of the traditional food cause.

What I'd like to see more of from Sally Fallon is what she does well--locate traditional European recipes. How about a French recipe for cooking potatoes in duck fat, rendering fat from beef bones and storing it, a good Polish cabbage roll, and a Norweigan recipe for how to use smoked kippers, and Southern recipe for tinned salmon croquettes.

The cause needs an author who has the connections to find those recipes from immigrant chefs who remember these traditions firsthand. They are all over the US.

So dont forget to include the authentic Indian coconut chutney, actual Chinese beef tendon soup or chicken bone broth soups, honest to goodness Jewish chicken foot soup, real Japanese tallow fried Okinawan entrees, Filipino chicken adobo, authentic Korean short ribs and sol lung tang marrow soup, and the genuine Mexican beef shank soup like caldo de res, menudo and other fine recipes before presenting them.

Any West Price fans out there in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco or Portland who want to write the missing volume? Come on!

I am continuing to work my way through this book. I skip around based on my interests. As a friend commented, I don't want it to make me a "food Nazi," but I do think we need to return to more basic, nutritious real food and this book helps us get there.