STILL SKINNY, BUT NOW THEY CAN COOK

“Skinny Bitch,” a diet book that is political, profane, passionately pro-animal rights — and hard-core vegan to boot — was published in 2005 and sold more than 850,000 copies. With its drawing of a svelte “Sex and the City” type on the cover, “Skinny Bitch” looked like a beach read, but it read like boot camp.

The authors, Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman, dressed readers down for following low-fat and low-carb diets, drinking diet soda, entrusting their health to the Food and Drug Administration, and most of all for ignoring the miserable realities of the American meat and dairy industries.
Despite its seemingly indigestible qualities, “Skinny Bitch” (Running Press) became one of the hottest-selling vegan books ever published. Now, the book’s peculiar combination of girl power, tough love and gross-out tales from the slaughterhouse has been translated to the kitchen. The authors’ new cookbook, “Skinny Bitch in the Kitch,” was published in December and reached No. 6 on the New York Times best-seller list in the paperback advice category last week.

“Skinny Bitch in the Kitch” helpfully condenses the entire content of the first book down to three pages (meat is murder; carbohydrates do not make you fat; always read the ingredients and don’t eat anything you can’t pronounce). The first book barely mentioned cooking, suggesting an eating style based on fruit, snacks and frozen food from the health-food store. It was a vegan version of the fast-food diet the authors say they used to follow equally zealously.
“I know I ate at Burger King every single day of 1992,” Ms. Freedman said. “For years, if it didn’t come from a drive-through or a can, I wasn’t interested.”

She first adopted veganism, a diet that avoids not just animal proteins like meat but also foods animals make like milk, eggs and honey, not as a health or weight-loss regime, but as an outgrowth of her interest in animal rights. At the time she was a booker for runway models, and Ms. Barnouin was one of her clients. Eventually, Ms. Freedman left the modeling agency to work as an animal-rights activist. By that point, she said, she had “harangued” Ms. Barnouin with so much information about the meat and dairy industries that she also became vegan.

With a vague notion of educating other “regular” people, Ms. Barnouin went on to study holistic nutrition through an unaccredited school for alternative health. Ms. Freedman went further down the vegan path, to the point that her dogs, Timber and Joey, eat a meat-free, dairy-free diet. (“And no, neither me nor my dogs wear leather,” she said.) They wrote “Skinny Bitch,” thinking that no publisher would accept it without drastic editing. They were wrong, and then they became famous. But, they say, they still did not really know how to cook. After “Skinny Bitch” was published, the authors were overwhelmed by requests for recipes and menus. “There comes a time in your life when you have to learn to cook,” Ms. Barnouin said. “For us, this was it.”

Ms. Barnouin had learned the basics of French cooking from her husband, a chef from Provence, in France. (They met in 2001, when she still ate butter and cheese.) But she and Ms. Freedman were still unsure enough of their cooking and publishing skills that they hired a vegan “cookbook consultant” to write the recipes. They say they came up with the list of just over 100 recipes and wrote the headnotes, such as: “‘Chicken’ Noodle Soup: Just like Mom used to make — minus the pieces of decomposing, rotting chicken carcass.”

The cookbook makes little use of traditional Asian meat substitutes (there is one recipe each for seitan and tempeh) but there is a lot of frozen Italian “sausage” and vegan creamer sprinkled around. Recipes without those foods were tastier, such as spaghetti squash with spicy braised greens, raisins and nuts, a huge hit at my table because of its subtle infusion of chipotle chilies.