To Render Lard
Cut in small pieces; wash well; put in a large pot with water enough to start it well to cooking. Boil quite rapidly until nearly done. When the cracklins begin to brown the lard should cook slowly to prevent burning. The cracklins of leaf lard will be of a light brown when sufficiently cooked, and will sink to the bottom. The fat of the backbone is very nice prepared in the same way. If you use the fat from the entrails it must be well washed and soaked for several days, changing the water often, using salt in the water to draw out the impurities.
When soaked very nice and white, wash in two or three warm waters; boil as you would leaf lard, only using more water. The cracklins are fine and soft and will fall to the bottom when done. Use them for making soap.
Wet rendering — starting the fat in water — is the older method and still the best one for a clean, white, neutral lard. The water buys you a margin against scorching, and everything hinges on driving it off slowly at the end.
- The hinge: low and slow once the water goesWater keeps the pot at 212F, so nothing can burn while it is present. As it boils away the fat climbs fast, and rendering above roughly 250F browns the lard and gives it a pork-roast flavour. Drop the heat the moment the cracklings begin to colour, as the recipe says.
- Leaf lard, fatback, and what to ask forLeaf lard is the soft fat from around the kidneys; it renders whitest and is the one worth having for pastry. "The fat of the backbone" is fatback, firmer and more savoury, better for frying and sausage. A butcher may be able to order either; supermarkets rarely carry them.
- Cut small, or grindThe instruction to cut in small pieces matters more than it sounds. Half-inch dice or a coarse grind renders in an hour or two; large chunks will scorch on the outside before the centres give up their fat.
- DonenessThe cracklings sinking is the real signal — they float while they still hold fat and drop when they are spent. Light brown and crisp is the finish for leaf fat; if they are dark, the lard has gone too far.
- Straining and storingLadle through a fine sieve lined with cheesecloth while hot, into clean jars. Any water left behind will settle out under the fat as it sets; pour it off, since residual moisture and stray meat particles are what turn lard rancid. Refrigerated it keeps several months, frozen a year.
- YieldReckon on about 12 to 14 oz of rendered lard per pound of leaf fat, a little less from fatback, plus a handful of cracklings.
- Skip the entrail fatThe long soak in changed salt water was how a farm kitchen salvaged the greasy fat stripped from the intestines. The recipe does not say where the fat was kept during those days, but a multi-day soak of raw fat is a spoilage risk that no amount of subsequent boiling makes appetising, and the fat gives a poorer lard in any case. There is no reason to do it now.
- The cracklingsLeaf-lard cracklings salted while hot are good eating, and cornbread made with them is traditional across the American South. The recipe consigns the soft entrail-fat cracklings to the soap kettle, which tells you what the author thought of them.
Before commercial shortening, rendering day followed hog-killing day in many rural American households, and a well-managed pot of leaf lard was a point of pride: white, odourless, and fine enough for pie crust and cake. The distinctions this recipe draws — leaf, backbone, entrail — track a strict hierarchy of quality, with the lowest grade going to soap rather than the table, since lye soap needs fat but does not care how it tastes. Wet rendering, the water-start method described here, was a common household technique precisely because it was forgiving; dry rendering in an open pot can give a higher yield but scorches easily. Lard's long decline through the twentieth century came with the rise of hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the return of leaf lard to butcher counters in recent years is often attributed to bakers who have found that nothing else makes quite the same flaky crust.