Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooners, always the whale-ship’s stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.… As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooners wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod , freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Strangely, I had two great American authors from which to choose when I considered literary references to rendering animal fat: Laura Ingalls Wilder, who I love, and Herman Melville, who I love more. I went with Melville for fully selfish reasons even though he’s far too dark for our purposes, and Ingalls would have been spot on appropriate. He’s my favorite, which is an unfortunate favorite to be saddled with as I am quite sure that it makes me a complete blowhard – not unlike that guy who claims to have enjoyed Citizen Kane or that insufferable woman in anthropology who could not pass up a reference to Foucault. It’s a sad lot to find myself amongst, but I think I can lose these unfortunate compatriots by behaving basely and interacting with animal scraps. Here we go.
Lard and butter are clearly the fats of choice in early American cooking. To this day, butter continues to be much beloved. Lard is not. At all. My grocery store sells it in no form, not even the self-stable health disaster that sometimes lives near the Crisco. Besides, I wanted to be true to the original intent and use a home produced lard. To do that, I needed some pig fat (leaf lard to be exact, a mild flavored fat that encases the kidney). After a frustrating and fruitless search for a local pastured pork supplier, Flying Pigs Farm in New York came through with gorgeous, mail-ordered leaf lard. See:
Most of the instructions for rendering suggest that the leaf lard be ground in a meat processor. I’ve been coveting the Kitchen Aid attachment that does just that, but alas, I do not own it. So I chopped and chopped and chopped and chopped until I had produced a pot full of carnage.
From here, the rendering (AKA melting) begins. I dumped the bowl of mammal fat into my stock pot and put it on very, very low heat. Some instructions suggest that you put a small amount of water in the pot to prevent scorching, but I was pretty sure my All-Clad would not disappoint me. It does not by nature scorch things, and I wasn’t going to hurt its feelings by suggesting otherwise. It did just fine.
Here’s the time lapse.
I started at 8:30 and by 9:00 things were starting to look melty:
10:00 was my least favorite phase. The fat turned gray and nasty, slimy and fully disgusting.
11:00 and the fat morsels were continuing to melt. The surface had also started to collect foam. I spent the next hour skimming it, compelled by the solemn advice of chefs to skim chicken stock to prevent clouding - this despite the fact that the product in question is not chicken broth, and even if it were, it wouldn’t really matter if it were cloudy.
12:00 I’ve come to my senses and stopped skimming. The remaining fat globules have been stewing in their own fat for long enough that they’re starting to turn translucent.
1:00 About one-third of the remaining fat chunks are floating now and they’ve started to gently crackle. I’ve been told this is the sound of the lard losing the last of its water, but I have no idea if that's actually true or if it’s just some line they feed the city kids to see if we’ll believe it and then humiliate ourselves by repeating it in public.
2:00 Lard finishes at 255 degrees when the cracklings (crispy leftover lard chunks) sink to the bottom of the pot. As you can see, I still have some floaters but my temperature is up to 275 and even the floaters are quite crispy. I decide my lard rendering adventure is complete.
The cracklings at the bottom of my pot are a mixture of little crispy squares of pork fat and crumbly, darker bits of who knows what. The floaters are pristine pork pillows so I drain those separately.
And then strain the remaining lard through a sieve. This next picture is not for the faint of heart. It makes me a little pale to be reminded. (Honestly, it didn’t seem that bad when I was in the middle of it).
I restrained the liquid lard through my favorite kitchen tool, a chinoise. I love it for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the pleasure I take in saying its name. There are not many times that I’m glad I took French, but referring to my beloved sieve is one of the few. (I really hate French. The sound of a man speaking that language makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out.) Anyway, the chinoise is a very fine-meshed strainer, and it stood in for cheesecloth which would have been the normal way to ensure that the last of the crackling detritus was removed from the lard.
I let it sit out for a bit on the counter and then transferred it to the refrigerator to finish cooling. My instructions sternly warn that it must be cooled quickly to ensure “fine-grained” lard. I obeyed.
And completely done!
My apartment smells very porky. When the lard was still raw, it was almost odorless. It smelled fresh and a little sweet. While rendering it smells like cooking pork. Personally, I don’t find it unpleasant, but I will also admit that it is not next up on the Yankee Candle short list. It makes my husband's stomach turn just thinking about it (a heads up that there are very distinct individual differences on this particular subject).
We must discuss cracklings, which were one of many motivations for rendering my own lard rather than purchasing it. One of the Little House books has an account of a pig butchering day, and it mentions hot cracklings drained from the rendered lard. I was all of 6 years old, but I seriously wanted some. In fact, my whole life, I’ve wanted some. Crispy, pork-flavored, unctuous, heavily salted and warm – it sounded like a made-up paragon of snacking perfection. And now I have had the good fortune of tasting these little morsels. The texture is delicately brittle. When you bite down, the liquid fat oozes from between a crystalline web of crisp, thin walls. It tastes fully and completely porcine. I loved it. It was precisely what I had been promised, one of the few hyped foods that deserve it. I ate another and then another and then 3 more, and then I felt ill. I am not a prima donna about fat or meat or salt so this puzzled me. My favorite food is bacon for goodness sake. All I can make of it is that I just don't deserve cracklings. Maybe if I spent my days plowing corn fields and struggled to keep my 24-waist Wranglers from falling off my bony hips, some cracklings would agree with me, but until then … well, I should have listened:
Cracklings were very good to eat, but Laura and Mary could have only a taste. They were too rich for little girls, Ma said.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods
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