Lard

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Leaf Lard is very difficult to find and when you do, it is expensive.  But there is nothing better for frying chicken, biscuits and pie crusts.  That Hormel product above is as mentioned, hydrogenated, smells terrible and if you have to make a choice, use Crisco over that Hormel product. 
 
Mom used to make these Po mans meals

Mom made her own flour mixture!

FRIED CORNBREAD CAKES

1 1/2 c. buttermilk cornmeal mix
Buttermilk, enough to bring batter to a little thicker than pancake batter
Lard, about 3/4" to 1" lard melted in frying pan

Spoon 1 to 1 1/2 tablespoons batter into hot lard four times to make 4 cakes at a time. Cook over medium to high heat. These cook fast. Stay with them and turn over when side one is brown. Very good and fast to prepare. Drain on paper towels.
 
Solid Evidence

Foods fried in a solid fat (is opaque and gets hard when put in fridge) absorb less fat while cooking than liquid oils. Lard is more dense or more "short" having less liquid than all others oils. Many are touting coconut oil shortening solid, hard and white. It is one of the few fats stable at temperatures over 400.
 
Goose lard is very popular here in Hungary and there is still a tub in my fridge bought for a Hungarian guest who stayed here a while ago. I might try doing roast potatoes in it. My mother always used half lard and half hard margarine in her pastry.
 
Rural families that raise a fattening pig take it to a local rural slaughterhouse.  Today you have the choice of taking the raw lard or not, it is frozen.  It was not uncommon at all for home rendering to take place in the 1970's, using a water bath canner pot in the oven, it is dangerous and messy. I have watched my grandmother render lard.  She used the finished product after removal of the cracklings as an oil to fry and a "shortening"  for baking biscuits and pastries.  She kept the finished product in a large crock in the basement with a tight lid.  She lived to be 89 and my grandfather continued on to 91.  They had eaten foods prepared with "lard" for their entire lives.  Like many things that are unacceptable today they thought nothing of it, and more  so they knew how to use the product. Another example of her prowess with danger was to heat the old house with a wood stove red hot, toss in wood ,sparks flying and never burn the house down.  What seemed like great adventures to a 9 year old were common everyday occurances for her. alr
 
From The Old Country

The article is dead on when my mom was growing up, they had it hard in those day but it gotten easier as time progressed as we know because, it can be done by large MFG's and now it is a dying art.....

Thanks Lauderess for helping me go down memory lane!
 
Cracklin' Press

We raised pigs as a kid and the butcher came and slaughtered the hogs and took them away for cutting and wrapping. People chose the slaughterer on recommendation for dependability and the butcher on word of mouth for the flavor of smoked meats and sausages. Commercial fabrications such a whole pork loin, crown roast etc were reduced to two basic cuts, fry or roast. We had bacon and sausage made but no hams because fresh leg of pork was saved for holidays since my dad wouldn't eat poultry. We used to let the butcher make the lard until mom found out he batch rendered and we got some lard that tasted of "boar" with a sickly musky odor. In the back of Grandmas celler was a lard or cracklin press. Hot fat was poured into a large cylinder, meaty bits and all. The handle cranked a weight down on top and you twisted until a maximum 30 pound wheel of cracklin's were perfectly formed with most of the lard pressed out. Cracklin's were used to flavor soup, gravy, corn bread, corn fritters, used as dog food and occassionally we'd sneak some and then spit out the greasy taste. Mom rendered her's in an old wash boiler on the cool side of her Majestic Wood stove.
 
Cracklin Corn Bread!!!

YUMMMM, now that is something GOOD!!!! My Grandmothers wood stove was a Majestic also!,I wish she had taken a picture of it, I never saw it, she got a Hotpoint in 54, but it had a large flat plate on the right side, and two eyes over the firebox, My Mother said she remembered Grandmother rubbing the top with a piece of fatback and frying pancakes right on the top ...she kept it so well polished they didnt stick, mainly she made yeast raised buckwheat cakes...if I only could find some buckwheat flour I would make some also...they are good!!Anyway, that stove was cream and green colored!! Wouldnt that be pretty!!
 
I grew up in the country and my folks always butchered our own pigs, beef and chickens.  We did it at our house and over several weekends as we did ours and cousins and aunts and uncles.  I have one of my parents big cast iron kettloes and my brother the other.  We never killed a boar (male) hog as as Kely said they have that muskey taste.  Always a gilt (cut male) that we fed out.  Used to Americalns wanted the fat pigs rounded rear end and thick fat across the back and belly now they are much much leaner less fat so less lard.  Butchering took place in the mid fall after we had two or three good frost and freezes.  After the first freeze the pigs hair would tighten up and be much hardered to scald and scrap the hair out.  After the 2nd or 3rd freeze frost would then loosed back up.  Dad wpuld get up early on a Friday morning and start the fires under the kettles and also a big steele barrel with water bring them to the boil.  They would do 3 pigs in a day the pigs had been off food for a day just water only to let their systems clean out.  The they would be driven out to the tress where we had a chain and pulleys and tie their back legs together and pull them up one quick shot from pistol to the head and the throat split to bleed out.  Blood was caught for making blood sausage.  the hog was bled out good then huled to the big barrel and scalded and then strug up and scraped with the knives then again to the bigger pot to scald again and scraped.  Then the eviseration was started everything into a smaller pot so they could be cleaned and washed (women did this as the guts were used for sausage stuffing.  gall cut out and tossed and the liver set aside to be sliced, they men then took the clean pig and poped the body open and let it hang to cool.  Did this to 3 pigs on Friday.  The bodies were left to hang in the cool air and were wrapped in went clean burlap bags over night.  This let the body go through rigor and the meat relax again.  The the butchering began on long table built over saw horses.  One half of a pig would be but and with knife and saw would be cut up by the men.  The kids would carry the different parts over to the ladies to be washed and then they would start with the salting and packing into salt barrels layering it all or cleaning the meat and wrapping it in freezer paper reading it for the freezer locker in town that would blazt breeze them and keep in storage for family.  The salted barrels would then be taken home for who ever and placed in a out building to cure first week the barrels would be emptied then the meat resalted and it would have drawn out lots of mositure.  The packed for another 3 or 4 weeks brought out and the salt wiped off and then to the smoke house to be smopked for 2 weeks.  Smoke house was a small building with things to hang the meat up in bags up outside was a small fire pit wher wood was placed to slowly burn and the top put on.  A 4 inch pipe went from it to the smoke house (cold smoking) and would fill the room with the smoke.  After that the women would make the cloth bags to cover the hams and bacon and either stored in cold place or sent to the locker.  Fresh meat was cut up for the freezer and sausage made and stuffed into the cloth casings or stiffed into the links and smokied in the smoke house.  Pork for a family of 6 for a year if used right.  The lard the women did like Kelly was saying.  Never mixed together they made it into 2 pound blocks to use and froze it al the locker.  The locker in town was huge and we had a big ben there with lock on it would hold our pork and whole beef and the 200 chickens we grew and raised aqnd killed for the year.  Once a month folks would go to the locker and pick out what meat to have for the comming month.  Haul that to the house and put in the chest freezer.  My dad and one uncle would also butcher a pig or fed out beef and go sell to folks off the pickup.  Ways to get some quick cash if needed.
 
Calling Jon Charles! You need to speak on this!

Good quality fresh Lard was the cornerstone of Great, and I mean Great, American Southern Cooking. It is the same foundation of great cooking as are the Three Fats of France:

 

1. Lard and to a lesser degree, Suet in the North. 

2. Butter in the Great Middle

3. Olive Oil in the South and Provence.

 

The Advent of Crisco transformed the culinary traditions of the American South into trailer-trash swill almost overnight. I loved, LOVED, Octavia Spencer's lecture on the benefits of Crisco in "The Help" but I respectfully disagree with the author. Crisco was and is a poor imitation of lard. It's just much cheaper and easier to store.

 

Lard is not only a great fat to use for Pie Pastry and Baking Powder Biscuits, it is unbeatable in frying chicken and other meats. One has to go to the trouble to find fresh lard, which is getting harder and harder to find. You don't need Leaf Lard (although it is exquisite) but go for the lard in Latin American markets that are in the refrigerator section, not at room temperature. We used to save bacon grease back in the day, and even a mixture of bacon fat and corn oil will produce respectable fried chicken.

 

If and when any of you go to Tuscany, you will find a small ceramic pot of a "schmear" next to the bread that's offered at table. It's called "lardo" and its the lard that's rendered from Prosciutto hams specifically for eating with the bread of the region. Almost puts butter to shame. BTW, old-world Italian butchers can be a great source for buying lard.

 

As far as I know, McDonalds stopped using suet in the Eighties when the hysterical food police blew the whistle on it. The food police hysterics are stupid, shrill and always ill-informed; don't listen to them.
 
Beef Fat or Tallow is a  good clear fat and has a good high smoking point.  Used correctly it is let things cook and not over brown them.  Good to used on hamburgers with onions to grill with them.  put the beef patty on the griddle then s bunch of thin sliced onion the pour a little melted tallow oven and let cooke.

 

 
 
Leaf lard

is the ONLY real lard available here, and only once in a very blue moon.

I deeply dislike factory farmed pork, as opposed to real pork, but I still eat it once in a while.

Tallow is available here, mostly in winter as bird food, but if I am feeling both ambitious and masochistic, I'll buy a few pounds and render it. It lingers, and I do not have a vent fan in the kitchen. (When I get to do a kitchen, a good vent system is the first thing going in!)

Lawrence/Maytagbear
 

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