Home › How to Cut and Cure Meats › TO KEEP LARD FROM MOLDING
TO KEEP LARD FROM MOLDING
Use a tub that has had no tainted lard or meat in it; scour it out thoroughly with two quarts of wheat bran to four of boiling water, but use no lye or soap. Fry the lard until the scraps are brown, but not scorched or burned; remove from the fire, cool until it can be handled, and strain into the prepared tub; when cold, set it away in the cellar. Lard dipped off as fast as it melts will look very white, but will not keep through the summer. No salt should be added, as it induces moisture and invites mold.
This is a rendering-and-storage method rather than a dish, and nearly everything in it turns on keeping water and food particles out of the finished fat. Pure fat does not spoil easily; the moisture and meat scraps carried into it are what mold feeds on.
- The hinge: render it dryCooking until the scraps (cracklings) are brown means the water in the fat has boiled off entirely. Fat dipped off early is prettier but still holds moisture, which is exactly why the original says it will not keep through the summer.
- Temperature for renderingThe original names no temperature; modern renderers work at a low, steady heat, roughly 225-250F in the fat, so the water simmers out before the solids scorch. Scorched cracklings give the whole batch a burnt taste that never leaves it.
- Scouring with branTwo quarts of wheat bran to four quarts of boiling water is a scrubbing paste for a wooden tub; the bran would have acted as an abrasive that left no taste of its own. The text gives no reason for forbidding lye and soap, but wood absorbs both, and both react with residual fat.
- Use glass or steel insteadA scoured wooden tub is a period vessel with no modern equivalent. Wide-mouth glass jars or food-grade steel are easier to sterilise and let you see any bloom of mold at once.
- Strain finer than they didStrain the hot fat through several layers of cheesecloth or a fine mesh sieve. Any suspended fleck of meat is a mold site and a source of off-flavour.
- "The cellar" means about 50F"The cellar" means cool storage -- A nineteenth-century cellar ran cool and dark, commonly somewhere between 40 and 60F, and often damp rather than dry. Modern practice is the refrigerator for a few months or the freezer for a year; light and warmth turn lard rancid long before it molds.
- No salt, and no water eitherNo salt -- The note about salt inducing moisture is sound: salt is hygroscopic and draws water into the fat.
- YieldReckon on somewhat under a pint of rendered lard per pound of fat, with leaf fat (from around the kidneys) giving the whitest, most neutral result and back fat a more porky one.
Buckeye Cookery belongs to a household economy in which a hog was killed at the first hard freeze and every part of it dealt with. Lard was the default cooking fat of the American Midwest well into the twentieth century, and what a family rendered at a butchering had to survive until the following autumn without refrigeration. The advice reflects hard-won practical knowledge about water activity long before anyone used that phrase: moisture, not fat, is what spoils. The browned scraps left in the kettle were not wasted either but eaten as cracklings or worked into cornbread. Commercial lard in tins, and later hydrogenated vegetable shortening, made this yearly labour obsolete within roughly two generations of the book's publication.