Cooking with Lard
Grit is one of my favorite magazines. When I was a kid Grit was a tabloid format publication that was thicker than a Sunday paper. At the time it was distributed by neighbors who went farm to farm, selling it for a little extra income. We rarely saw the same person selling it twice and availability was spotty, but we always bought it when we could. I'm not sure what all was inside, but it was targeted to farm families. I know there were plenty of recipes, but the thing I cared about was the twenty pages of newspaper comic strips. Our "local" paper was the Tulsa World, which was delivered by the rural mail carrier. Tulsa was about a hundred miles away. Grit had dozens of strips the World didn't.
Today's Grit magazine is an offering from Ogden Publications, the parent company of Mother Earth News. It is a standard magazine format, available in some book stores (if there are any left) and at the checkout of rural Dollar General Stores, and by subscription. I subscribe. They have a little bit of nostalgia content and a lot of farming and homesteading content.
I also subscribe to their email newsletter. I have to take exception to one of their recent emails. It advertises a new cookbook, Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient. My grandmother's secret ingredient was Crisco.
My mother grew up with biscuits and gravy at least two meals a day, made with lard, and she was done with it. We hardly ever had biscuits or gravy and never both at once. Once my grandpa died, my grandmother was alone (she came to live in a trailer house on our farm) and she did all of her baking for us grand kids--and she used shortening. My mother associated lard with poor people.
We lived on a farm near Watts, Oklahoma, a railroad boom town that had shrunk to a population of 300 when diesel engines pushed the steam locomotives out of service. All my friends were farm kids I knew from Watts School. We rode the school bus every morning on winding dirt roads through the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.
Whenever I went to spend the night at friends' houses, I got to eat biscuits and gravy--made with lard!
Everybody cooked with lard, which they bought at Waldroop's store in lard stands. A stand is a six and a half gallon tin can with little folding handles on the side. Search "lard stand" on eBay and you can see what I'm talking about. Lard stands are a big nostalgia item. Truth be told, we had an awful lot of lard stands around our house, so shortening must have been a fairly new innovation in our house. I was fourth of fives kids and I don't know what they ate before I came along, except that squirrel was on the menu a little more often.
Lard served as an all-purpose ingredient. It was cooking oil and shortening and lubricant for squeaky hinges. The empty lard stands were washed out and used for storing things, like clothes that older kids had outgrown and younger kids hadn't grown into yet (you'll never know the joy of first day of school wearing a pair of slightly too big OshKosh overalls that smell like mothballs). Kathy and I still have a lard stand around, but it's out in one of the storage sheds, full of old baby clothes or something.
I'm sure the cookbook is great, just don't talk about my grandma. Lard has been rediscovered by chefs and bakers in recent years. Lard has still been in stores all along, but in smaller plastic buckets. It's essential for making refried beans, as far as I'm concerned. Now you can also find gourmet lard in upscale stores and organic lard in health food stores. If you've never eaten lard, it is similar to bacon grease, but without the bacon flavor.
Around here we do most of our cooking with peanut oil. It has a mild, unobtrusive flavor and it is healthier than "cooking oil," which is likely to contain GMO soy, corn and or canola, or palm oil from some third world country. We use sesame oil as a flavoring and olive oil for occasional sauteing.
I've read a number of articles on cooking with lard and the consensus seems to be that lard has gotten a bad rap as far as health concerns. So here's the breakdown: lard tastes good, it makes a good shortening, it's healthy for you and it has roots and traditions that go back to the beginning of cooking.
Okay, maybe I'll order the cookbook. It's $19.99 and you can Google it or go to Grit.com. I don't get paid for endorsing anything, let alone Grit or this cookbook. Maybe someday.
Stephen P.
Today's Grit magazine is an offering from Ogden Publications, the parent company of Mother Earth News. It is a standard magazine format, available in some book stores (if there are any left) and at the checkout of rural Dollar General Stores, and by subscription. I subscribe. They have a little bit of nostalgia content and a lot of farming and homesteading content.
I also subscribe to their email newsletter. I have to take exception to one of their recent emails. It advertises a new cookbook, Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient. My grandmother's secret ingredient was Crisco.
My mother grew up with biscuits and gravy at least two meals a day, made with lard, and she was done with it. We hardly ever had biscuits or gravy and never both at once. Once my grandpa died, my grandmother was alone (she came to live in a trailer house on our farm) and she did all of her baking for us grand kids--and she used shortening. My mother associated lard with poor people.
We lived on a farm near Watts, Oklahoma, a railroad boom town that had shrunk to a population of 300 when diesel engines pushed the steam locomotives out of service. All my friends were farm kids I knew from Watts School. We rode the school bus every morning on winding dirt roads through the foothills of the Ozark Mountains.
Whenever I went to spend the night at friends' houses, I got to eat biscuits and gravy--made with lard!
Everybody cooked with lard, which they bought at Waldroop's store in lard stands. A stand is a six and a half gallon tin can with little folding handles on the side. Search "lard stand" on eBay and you can see what I'm talking about. Lard stands are a big nostalgia item. Truth be told, we had an awful lot of lard stands around our house, so shortening must have been a fairly new innovation in our house. I was fourth of fives kids and I don't know what they ate before I came along, except that squirrel was on the menu a little more often.
Lard served as an all-purpose ingredient. It was cooking oil and shortening and lubricant for squeaky hinges. The empty lard stands were washed out and used for storing things, like clothes that older kids had outgrown and younger kids hadn't grown into yet (you'll never know the joy of first day of school wearing a pair of slightly too big OshKosh overalls that smell like mothballs). Kathy and I still have a lard stand around, but it's out in one of the storage sheds, full of old baby clothes or something.
I'm sure the cookbook is great, just don't talk about my grandma. Lard has been rediscovered by chefs and bakers in recent years. Lard has still been in stores all along, but in smaller plastic buckets. It's essential for making refried beans, as far as I'm concerned. Now you can also find gourmet lard in upscale stores and organic lard in health food stores. If you've never eaten lard, it is similar to bacon grease, but without the bacon flavor.
Around here we do most of our cooking with peanut oil. It has a mild, unobtrusive flavor and it is healthier than "cooking oil," which is likely to contain GMO soy, corn and or canola, or palm oil from some third world country. We use sesame oil as a flavoring and olive oil for occasional sauteing.
I've read a number of articles on cooking with lard and the consensus seems to be that lard has gotten a bad rap as far as health concerns. So here's the breakdown: lard tastes good, it makes a good shortening, it's healthy for you and it has roots and traditions that go back to the beginning of cooking.
Okay, maybe I'll order the cookbook. It's $19.99 and you can Google it or go to Grit.com. I don't get paid for endorsing anything, let alone Grit or this cookbook. Maybe someday.
Stephen P.
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