I will be posting up a new Seignalet legal recipe every day to all the video channels. I will post the rumble videos here.

Dr. Seignalet’s book

Here is my introduction to Dr. Seignalet’s book (video underneath), not yet translated into English (will it ever be?), the perennial best seller in France, note the 650 mainly 5 star reviews: “L’alimentation – ou la troisieme medecine” which I translate as Nutrition – the third medicine.

What he meant by third medicine is this: there is orthodox (pharma) medicine (which I personally have little time for by the way), alternative medicine (herbalism, vitamins, therapeutic hyperthermia etc.) and there is nutrition which he thinks is the third medicine. I believe that he really thought nutrition was the first medicine and I share this belief. The basic idea is this: For tens of thousands of years our Paleolithic ancestors led a nomadic existence, hunting and foraging for food. He thinks that they ate food raw and that the image of cavemen sitting round a fire roasting meat is a figment of our imagination. See “The scoop on their poop”  in my article Your cavement ancestors did not have your condition . Milk and dairy is a recent innovation and a few hundred years is not enough for our digestive system to evolve to be able to digest this “modern” food properly.    Here is Dr. Seignalet on “Cooking and its problems“.  Translated by me (by kind permission of the Seignalet family).

How I stole from the best to make the recipes

To make the recipes I have used 3 books:

1. L’alimentation crue : 400 recettes – Une application pratique de “L’alimentation ou la 3e médecine”. Nutrition using raw food, a practical application of Dr. Seignalet’s book written by a doctor and a chef in 1999 (3 years before Seignalet died).  400 recipes.  If you read French, even at a rudimentary level, I highly recommend buying it. The recipes are not complete meals. You are given delicious recipes to make fish ceviche (fish “cooked” raw in lime or lemon juice) and meat as tartare or carpaccio and delicious salads and raw sauces. No actual cooking is used in any of the recipes.

2. The Flavour Bible amazon com – amazon uk. This beautifully produced American book uses Chef’s recipes as a springboard for how to combine ingredients.

3. The Flavour Thesaurus. amazon uk – amazon com.

Here is what Nikki says about Broccoli and Beef (p.125) “A partnership forged on their shared ferrous tang as much as the bittersweet contrast”. This inspired my broccoli coleslaw with steak tartare. See the recipe video underneath. It’s recipe no. 9. So out of sequence but I think it’s one of my star recipes so let’s start things with a bang!

Dr. Seignalet said that as we are all sedentary now we only need to eat animal protein once a day.  So that ties in nicely with an earlier therapeutic diet called “Food Combining”.  One of its tenets is that you should not eat concentrated protein and concentrated carbohydrates at the same meal.  The basic idea is that protein is digested in the stomach and carbohydrate is digested in the intestine and if you mix them in the same meal the digestive system isn’t able to digest either properly.   Read more here.

Super nutritious fermented foods

Sally Fallon gave me the inspiration to use fermented foods such as sauerkraut in the recipes. The Eastern Europeans in the UK virtually live on fermented food if the Polish etc grocers are anything to go by.  Their shelves are groaning with dozens of kinds of pickles in jars.  In an emergency you can compose a quick tasty and nutritious meal from some pickled borscht, sauerkraut,  pickled cucumbers etc.  Did you know that Poland was the only country in Europe that was unaffected by the bubonic plague in medieval times?  Did you also know that the Poles had been invaded by the Tartars who taught them how to make sauerkraut from cabbage?  Sauerkraut is a vitamin c power house.  So while other Europeans were scurvy ridden because they had no fresh food in winter, the Poles were getting plenty of vitamin c to fight off the plague.  A lesson for us!

Sauerkraut and sprouted pulses – a winning combination

I found that sauerkraut goes really well with sprouted seeds and pulses.  It acts as a sort of bridge to make the sprouts go much better with other salad ingredients like tomato and avocado.

I will upload my own sauerkraut videos here among the recipe videos.

So to compose my recipes I have looked first to the French book for inspiration.  I have combined the fish ceviche or meat tartare and carpaccio recipes with a salad for my “protein meal” or a salad and sprouted seeds or pulses for the “carbohydrate meal”.  Raw seeds and sprouts contain protease inhibitors which make them indigestible when raw.  The fact of soaking them and sprouting them neutralises these ant-nutrients and increases the vitamin yield by a huge factor.  Interestingly,  sprouted chick peas taste exactly like cooked ones but many of the beneficial nutrients are destroyed in cooking of course.

The Flavour Bible and the Flavour Thesaurus are mainly concerned with cooked foods of  course but I’m still able to find plenty of inspiration in them.  In Nikki Segnit’s Flavour Thesaurus for example she tells us under the heading “Brocolli and Beef” “A partnership forged on their shared ferrous tang as much as the bittersweet contrast”.   So I made broccoli coleslaw to go with my steak tartare. To die for!

I hope you enjoy my recipes as much as I have enjoyed making the videos of them and scoffing the results.

Here is the featured video. Steak tartare with broccoli coleslaw made with garlic mayonnaise. This is so delicious and so nutritious that I recommend making it a staple. Make sure you put the steak in your home freezer for at least 10 days to kill any potential parasites before using it in the recipe.