May-June 2016

ROUSES

EVERYDAY

maY | JUNE 2016

The 2003 cookbook “The Gift of Southern Cooking” is one of

McGreger’s kitchen bibles. And no wonder: in it, Edna Lewis and

Scott Peacock call for making buttermilk biscuits with “good, fresh,

very cold lard.”Peacock, who is Lewis’junior by several decades, tells

how the two chefs started exchanging gifts of food early in their

friendship. Lewis would give him things like frozen gooseberries,

damson plums, and “half-gallon Mason jars of lard, rendered by her

sister.”

In parts of the rural South, a Mason jar of self-rendered lard is as

personal an offering as a freshly baked pie or Lane cake — because

the lard likely came from a hog raised by the gifter or someone in the

family. In Louisiana tradition, a family hog killing is a community

event warranting its own name: boucherie. Many traditional

Louisiana products and dishes were born of the boucherie: boudin,

backbone stew, chaudin or ponce (stuffed pig’s stomach), cracklin’,

ti salé (a peppered salt pork), and hogshead cheese. Lard, which has

a limitless shelf life when stored at cool temperatures, is used for

cooking cracklin’, for making soap, and as a preservative.

Vincent Fontenot, a U.S. National Park Ranger at Prairie Acadian

Cultural Center inEunice,Louisiana,toldme that,pre-refrigeration,

“You could smoke the meat and preserve it and it eat it year-round.

You’d put it in these crocks with lard, and if you wanted sausage in

the middle of the winter, you just opened that crock and pulled a

piece of sausage out and eat it.”

photo by

Romney Caruso

the

Pork

issue