Around Bordeaux there is a day at the end of Lent called Jeudi Gras - Fat Thursday. It's a celebration of the end of fasting, and in the town of Bazas they parade the fattest cattle from the surrounding countryside through the town. The animals have been plumped up on grain until they weigh as much as a tonne, and they progress through the streets to cheers and music, each decorated with ribbons and the name of the butcher's shop where they will end up.

There follows a great communal blowout on grilled Bazadaise beef, for which some of the townsfolk wear elaborate red and yellow capes. The colours celebrate the meat - bright red and thickly marbled with yellow fat, and of course, supremely tasty. Fat, as the nose-to-tail chef Fergus Henderson says, “is where the flavour lies”. Fat, glorious fat. It used to be central to our cooking lives - a larder was a cool room where a household stored its bacon and fats.

Now in Britain fat is a secret and sinful passion. How do you make the best fish and chips? Fry them in beef fat - though few chippies would dare to admit it. Why do restaurants buy beef and lamb at a grade or two higher in fat than a supermarket would ever dare put in front of the shopper? Because if you want delicious, juicy steak it needs its oils - as the fat melts with the cooking it carries the molecules of flavour with it.

Why do all the special low-fat foods that we've been persuaded are best for our health and our waistlines seem to contain so much salt, sugar and taste-enhancing chemicals? Because that's the trade-off - remove the fat and lose the flavour.

I've been salivating over a fascinating and brave new book by the Australian-Canadian chef Jennifer McLagan. It's called, shamelessly, Fat. In it McLagan puts a wholly convincing case that fat is good and one of the most tragically abandoned materials of our modern, wasteful kitchen. She argues that the decades in which we spurned animal fats have spoilt our food and done nothing to improve our health: we substituted sugar, starches and “trans-fats” (hydrogenated vegetable oils) and ended up more obese and prone to heart disease than our ancestors were.

“Fear of fat is instilled into our consciousness,” she writes. “We are a generation that knows everything about olive oil but has no idea what good butter tastes like, let alone what to do with lard and suet.” McLagan is more than a fat evangelist (in person she is, I should point out, pretty skinny): she stalks butchers' shops for the right stuff, and keeps suet, dripping and lard in her freezer to cook inspiring things with them. I'm planning to make her steak and kidney pud as soon as I can find a butcher who'll sell kidneys still encased in their fat, which you then shred to make real suet.

Many of her recipes involve putting animal fat back in its rightful place in favourite recipes - biscuits and pastry made delicious and crumbly with lard, roasts browned with beef or lamb dripping, or larded, with long strips of pork fat sewn into the meat.

Her king of all fats is from pigs, still celebrated in sensible countries such as Italy and Ukraine, where it's spiced or smoked, cut thin and adored. She offers unctuous thrills such as lamb fat chapattis, confit of turkey and Beurre de Gascogne - nothing to do with butter, but a jam of slow-cooked garlic cloves, duck fat and seasoning for adding to mashed potatoes or lentils.

Things are improving here - at least the margarine years are at last over and butter is respectable again. (Nutritionists say that butter may well have been as good for us all along). The generations that grew up on margarine-smeared sandwiches may consider litigation for all their lunch-box misery.

Can we conquer our fear of the other animal oils and live once more off the fat of the land? Bring on the lardy cakes, I say.

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

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