In her new book, "Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes," Jennifer McLagan effectively makes the case that fat is not only essential to good cooking but to good health. In four sections covering butter, pork fat, poultry fat, and beef and lamb fats, she offers a number of recipes to help us see the light.

McLagan makes the case that fat "is just as indispensable to our health as it is to our cooking."

"I LOVE FAT," McLagan writes in the opening of her 2008 book. The phrase not only makes a compelling opening line; it could just as easily serve as the mantra for anyone's Freudian id.

The human animal does love fat, and for most of our history, fat — especially the sumptuous, saturated animal fat highlighted in this book — has been precious, and every association with it has been a positive one. Consider phrases like the "fat of the land," and "which side your bread is buttered on."

But as McLagan explains in her book, fat lost some of its luster in the last quarter of the 20th century when a number of studies seemed to link its consumption to heart disease.

As it turns out, some of the research that fed our fear of fat was flawed because it did not distinguish between man-made fats (hydrogenated vegetable oils full of trans fats) and naturally saturated fats like butter and lard.

Fat's reputation is due for some rehabilitation, and McLagan is just the woman to do it. The Australian-born chef, food stylist and writer makes her home in Toronto but spends a good deal of time in Paris, where she once worked. Her 2005 book, "Bones," celebrated those parts of beef, pork, lamb and chicken that most contemporary cooks had regarded as little more than an inconvenience. She helped us recognize that bones are a vitally important part of any animal food, and in the process, she picked up awards from both the International Association of Culinary Professionals and the James Beard Foundation.

Fat is, of course, even more vital than bones. It is, as the author persuasively points out in a series of short essays, "just as indispensable to our health as it is to our cooking."

"We need to rethink our relationship with fat," she writes. "After decades of low-fat propaganda, most of what we think we know about fat just isn't true." Not all animal fats are saturated. Eating fat, she tells us, does not make us fat. And a low-fat diet is not good for us.

"Diets low in fat, it turns out, leave people hungry, depressed and prone to weight gain and illness."

Hear, hear, says this cook. And bring on the butter, which is precisely what our author does.

Actually, the book is divided into four chapters on butter, pork fat, poultry fat and beef and lamb fats. Each type of fat has its merits for the serious cook. Drippings from beef fat are incorporated into pastry crusts for Cornish pasties. Chicken and duck fats are woven into potato dishes as well as confits and one of the most sumptuous formulas for cassoulet ever committed to the page.

Pork fat, which McLagan dubs "the king," gets the royal treatment in soups, pasta and vegetable dishes. A bacon baklava owes some allegiance to the Pacific Northwest. "A friend from Seattle," McLagan writes, "described an all-pork dinner she ate that finished with bacon baklava." (Disclosure: If I'm not mistaken, I was at that dinner. It was at Brasa, and chef-owner Tamara Murphy's savory-sweet bending of the rules was generally regarded as something of a triumph.) Even if the book contained only the chapter on butter, it would be worth several times its weight in that delicious gold stuff. In addition to savories like Indian butter chicken and butter poached scallops, there are formulas for brown butter ice cream and a salted caramel tart that conjure the very spirit of Fran Bigelow's salted caramels. The recipes devoted to butter are so varied, detailed and compelling that they constitute a laudable collection in and of themselves.

Larded between the recipes (sorry, I couldn't help that) are dozens of sidebars that shed light on the history, science and lore of fat. Look for tales of butter gods and butter saints, detailed explanations of fat's role in soap-making and food preservation. Delve into the etymology of lard, grease and nitroglycerin as you peruse the book, which is so well-written that it could bring almost as much pleasure to an armchair cook as it will to those of us who roll up our sleeves and delve in.

All my efforts to make caramel corn were in vain until I found this recipe, which uses way more butter than any version I'd ever seen. Pureed chipotle peppers add just the right punch. I popped half a cup of kernels in a quarter cup of coconut oil to get the eight cups of popped corn called for in the recipe.

SPICY BUTTERED POPCORN