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Lard
“I
t’s the one who holds the skillet that
knows the cost of the lard.” — from
“Gombo Zhebes: Little Dictionary of
Creole Proverbs,” by Lafcadio Hearn, 1885.
In 2005,
The New York Times
ran an op-ed
piece called “High on the Hog,” in which the
writer Corby Kummer calls for the comeback
of “the great misunderstood fat”: lard.
In the span of just a fewparagraphs,Kummer
covers the rise of solid vegetable shortenings
like Crisco (“developed by industry to mimic
the virtues of lard but relieve housewives of
the burden of rendering their own fat”);
how America’s war against saturated fats
around the 1970s demonized lard and other
animal products like butter and cream; how
it turns out that vegetable shortening’s trans
fats are worse for our health that just about
anything else; and how lard’s nutritional
profile beats butter’s.
And that’s not to mention how lard can
make pastry crusts flakier, fried chicken
lighter and crisper, and biscuits more savory.
In the article, Kummer takes heart in a visit
to the more-than-century-old LeJeune’s
Bakery in the Cajun town of Abbeville,
Louisiana, where the bakers work lard
sourced from a local cracklin’maker into the
dough of their airy French bread loaves and
sweet hand pies.
When I visited LeJeune’s in 2005, I watched as fifth-generation
baker Matt LeJeune used a tin can to measure some of the opaque
liquid fat and then added it to a mixture that would later become fig
pies. Pie dough is tricky, he told me. “If I would take four ounces of
lard out of a hundred-pound recipe, it would be like night and day.”
Southerners don’t hold the patent on lard, but its use and usefulness
are engrained enough in southern cooking culture that the lard-
shaming of the latter part of the last century didn’t entirely harm its
reputation here. At the New Orleans seafood house Casamento’s,
proprietor C. J. Gerdes fries everything — oysters, shrimp, hand-
cut potatoes — in lard. Across the Mississippi River in Algiers, the
crisp, chestnut-colored fried chicken at Chubbie’s is cooked in a
mixture of animal and vegetable fats. In his cookbook “Real Cajun,”
Donald Link advises frying catfish in bacon fat. “This preparation
works best in a cast-iron skillet,” he adds, animal fats being to the
cast-iron skillet what butter is to the omelet pan. “If you don’t have
one, I suggest that you go out immediately and buy one.”
April McGreger, the author of “Sweet Potatoes: A Savor the South
Cookbook” and the ebullient owner-operator of Farmers Daughter
Brand Pickles & Preserves in North Carolina, has always been
a lard devotee. “When you use lard, biscuit-making is much less
intimidating,” she says. “The wrong brand of flour or a slightly too-
rough hand, and a butter biscuit is tough and unappealing. Because
it has less water, and because it is less temperature-sensitive, lard
makes more tender biscuits. It also makes crispier bottoms, which
I love.” McGreger notes that she makes an exception when baking
for vegetarian, Muslim, and Jewish eaters.
Grease
is the
word
by
Sara Roahen
“Stop making such a big deal out of lard. It is no less healthy than
other fats, and it is much more delicious. Nothing makes as flaky or as
delicious biscuits or piecrusts as ones made with part lard. And there
is simply nothing better for frying.”
—Chef John Currence, Pickles, Pigs & Whiskey