Bring back beef dripping!

00:00 02:40

Angus Colwell has narrated this article for you to listen to.

For several years, a debate has raged (mainly on Twitter, now X) over whether animal fats are actually better for you than industrially processed ‘seed oils’. The debate has become more mainstream thanks to the efforts of the new US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who wants to Make America Healthy Again. His strategy involves a back-to-the-land style embrace of animal fats, particularly beef dripping.

The anti-seed oil community use technical-sounding terms like ‘linoleic acids’ to firm up their side of the debate but fundamentally their point is that our bodies have evolved to process animal fats rather than overly processed stuff. J.D. Vance doesn’t cook with seed oils, and last week, RFK congratulated the US chain Steak ’n Shake for switching the frying oil for its chips to beef tallow.

You don’t hear all that much here about beef dripping (as tallow is known) unless you happen to be in Newcastle or Yorkshire. It fell out of fashion for a few reasons: industrial seed oils were cheaper, more people became vegetarian, and BSE didn’t help beef fat’s reputation either. We also started to kid ourselves that we could make deep-fried foods somehow ‘healthier’ if the oil contained fewer calories.

The risk now is that RFK’s endorsement of dripping threatens to make the issue partisan. Are you a beef-fat boy or a seed-oil boy? But let’s put politics aside and focus on the most important matter when it comes to food – taste. The vital point is that food fried in beef dripping tastes better.

I visited Marlow Fish Bar in south London for research, which is one of a handful of London chippies that still uses dripping. The whole shop is filled with the amazing honk of beef fat, and I was delighted to discover that it serves one of the best fish and chips I’ve had. Was the taste of beef dripping making me more virile, more manly? I like to think so. My one note of caution is to ensure that chips fried in dripping are eaten quickly, otherwise they go soggy.

Chef Ed McIlroy is well aware of the superiority of dripping, and he is helping to lead the comeback. At Tollington’s, a chippy in Finsbury Park that he has converted into a tapas bar, they serve ‘chips bravas’ which are cooked in dripping. Ed buys 40kg of aged beef fat from the butcher every couple of weeks, then renders the fat down into a liquid. The chips are given their third fry in the beef fat. ‘It’s so much better for you than a lot of oils that are available on the market,’ he says. ‘That’s evident when we clean out the machines. The side that we have [other] oils in are often caked in carbon deposits and solidified fat, whereas when we empty the beef fat side of the fryer, the metal is untarnished and relatively clean.’

Cooking with seed oil is a sad attempt to fiddle at the margins, to console yourself that because you’re frying in sunflower oil your dinner is slightly less atherosclerotic. But there’s a better way. Fry less, but fry better – in lard, or beef dripping, or duck fat, or something similar. Whether beef dripping really is better for your health is, as they say, ‘outside the scope’ of a ‘Notes on…’ column. But come on. You want it to be. I want it to be. If not for our arteries, then for our souls.