Read The Ancestral Table: Traditional Recipes for a Paleo Lifestyle Online
Authors: Russ Crandall
The Ancestral Table: Traditional Recipes for a Paleo Lifestyle
First Published in 2013 by Victory Belt Publishing Inc.
Copyright © Russ Crandall
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN 13: 978-1628600056 (paperback)
978-1-628600-26-1 (ebook)
This book is for entertainment purposes. The publisher and author of this cookbook are not responsible in any manner whatsoever for any adverse effects arising directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided in this book.
RRD 0113
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CHAPTER 1: DIET AND KITCHEN FUNDAMENTALS
CHAPTER 2: SAUCES, CONDIMENTS, AND OTHER BASICS
CHAPTER 9: FRUITS AND DESSERTS
How should we eat?
Russ Crandall has an answer:
gourmet ancestral cuisine.
We should eat as if we were gourmet chefs of the Paleolithic era—the caveman’s Julia Child or Anthony Bourdain.
Pairing gourmet and ancestral sounds odd, as unlikely as Mammoth Bourguignon, Dodo St. Jacques, or Sabertooth Provençale. Gourmet cuisine, after all, is a recent invention. Only a few hundred years ago, spices like pepper, saffron, cinnamon, and nutmeg were so rare and precious that Europeans valued them above gold. Sugar, so abundant and cheap today, was considered a medicine, not a food, and the word itself was coined only in the 13th century; crusader William of Tyre had called it “sweet salt.” Without modern wealth and transportation technologies to bring ingredients from all over the world, it seems, there could not have been anything resembling gourmet cuisine.
Even if we
can
unite gourmet and Paleolithic cuisine, why should we? Popular wisdom holds that, as Mark Twain said, “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.” Wouldn’t eating gourmet food every day wreck our health?
But the science says Twain was wrong and Russ is right. Both the cavemen and the gourmands have important things to teach us about healthful eating.
Let me introduce myself. My name is Paul Jaminet, and I am, with my wife Shou-Ching, the author of
Perfect Health Diet: Regain Health and Lose Weight by Eating the Way You Were Meant to Eat,
published by Scribner in 2012.
Shou-Ching and I invented the Perfect Health Diet, or PHD, as our readers like to call it, as a cure for our personal health problems. Our journey to the PHD began in 2005 when we first tried the Paleo diet—a popular approximation of Paleolithic diets. At the time we both had chronic diseases that had gotten worse every year for a dozen years, with no help from doctors. The Paleo diet was the first thing we tried that made a difference. The differences were both good and bad—some things got better, some things got worse—but we were excited because we had found a tool that could change the course of our diseases.
Hippocrates was on to something when he said, “Let food be thy medicine.”
Diet matters for health,
and a good diet has great healing power.
We adopted a research strategy for finding the perfect diet. Starting from an ancestral template—meaning we’d eat only natural whole foods, the kinds that our ancestors hunted and gathered—we would avoid any food that contained significant amounts of toxins after cooking. To find the right proportions of different food types, we researched the optimal intake level of every nutrient and designed the diet to include foods in specific proportions that deliver the optimal amount of every nutrient simultaneously—assuring neither a deficiency nor an excess of any nutrient.
It took us seven years of research to design this diet. When we were done, we were shocked to find that it bore a remarkable resemblance to gourmet cuisine. Our food was delicious!
We soon realized that this was no coincidence. Why did a taste preference for certain foods and food combinations evolve in human beings? To give us heart attacks? Surely not: evolution favors those who succeed, who are healthy and fit and survive to have children and grandchildren.
Evolution must have designed our taste preferences to make us healthy. In our ancestral environment—the environment of the Paleolithic era—eating delicious gourmet-style food must have been the path to great health. It must have generated virile warriors, productive hunters and gatherers, insightful toolmakers, and fertile mothers and fathers.
Nor were our Paleolithic ancestors unable to design complex meals that appealed to those innate taste preferences. Cooking is as ancient as the control of fire: anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking may have been invented as early as 1.6 million years ago. Animal hides over an open flame will not burn as long as they contain water, and they make fine stew and soup pots. Communal feasts were probably common by about 250,000 years ago, when hearths became common features of human dwellings. Paleolithic chefs undoubtedly had many ingredients to choose from: they were intimately familiar with their plant and animal environment, and anthropologists find residues of hundreds of food species in individual Paleolithic settlements—far more variety than the thirty or so species that most modern Americans eat.
With the development of agriculture and civilization, kitchen technologies progressed and the range of cooking methods broadened; transportation improvements enabled the gathering of ingredients and recipe ideas from all over the world; and increasing numbers of chefs, supported by wealthy clients, acquired the time and resources to refine recipes. Simple Paleolithic cooking methods were made sophisticated, and the world’s traditional cuisines developed. Recipes were continually refined to become ever more satisfying.
Caveman cooking became traditional cuisine; traditional cuisines turned into gourmet artistry.
We stand at a pivotal moment in the history of food. Two threads of insight are now ready for a synthesis. On one hand, we appreciate more than ever that our innate taste preferences are our friends. We should eat to please ourselves, for it is gourmet food that will bring us good health. On the other hand, we realize that those taste preferences can mislead us if we try to satisfy them with unnatural ingredients. Many agricultural and industrial ingredients, some developed recently in chemistry laboratories, appeal to our innate taste preferences even as they fail to nourish our bodies. Our path to good health is clear. We must reproduce our ancestral food environment today by confining ourselves to the natural whole foods and gentle cooking methods available to our Paleolithic ancestors. With that restriction in place, our taste preferences will guide us.
It’s not necessary to master the science of nutrition in order to be healthy. It is necessary to be able to cook delicious food. You must be able to combine ingredients in delectable ways. That’s what Russ and
The Ancestral Table
are here to teach us. Drawing upon the world’s traditional cuisines and their accumulated knowledge of the most delicious food combinations, Russ shows us how to make the world’s most healthful food.
