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TRYING LARD
Cut the fat into small pieces, put into kettle, and pour in enough water to cover the bottom; boil gently until the "scraps" settle, or until the water has all evaporated, stirring often to prevent burning. Take off, strain into stone jars, and set in a cool place. The quality of the lard is improved by sprinkling over and slowly stirring in one tablespoon of soda to every five gallons of lard, just before removing from the fire. After adding soda, the kettle must be removed from the stove, and watched closely, and stirred constantly, as it foams rapidly, and is very likely to run over, and, if on stove, is likely to take fire. The leaf should be tried by itself for the nicest cooking. That from the smaller intestines, and the flabby pieces, not fit for salting, should be thrown into lukewarm water and allowed to stand for twenty-four hours, and then should be tried by itself, and the lard set away where it will freeze, and, by spring, the strong taste will be gone. A tea-cup of water prevents burning while trying.
"Trying" is rendering: melting fat out of tissue at low heat until only browned scraps remain. The instructions hold up well, but the scale assumed here is a whole butchered hog, and a few details need translating.
- Scale it downThe recipe works at whole-hog scale, dosing soda by the five gallons of lard. A practical home batch is 2-5 lb of fat, which fits a heavy Dutch oven. Expect roughly a cup and a half to two cups of lard per pound of fat, less from trim carrying more connective tissue.
- Leaf lard is the pointLeaf fat is the crumbly deposit around the kidneys and loin. Rendered alone, as the recipe insists, it is nearly odorless and neutral, and it is what makes pie crust and biscuits worth the trouble. Back fat and trim render into a heavier, more porky fat better suited to frying and confit.
- Grind or dice small"Small pieces" means quarter-inch dice or, better, a coarse grind. Larger chunks scorch on the outside before the interior gives up its fat, and scorched lard tastes of it permanently.
- The water trickThe teacup of water and the splash covering the kettle bottom are the same insurance: water holds the pan at 212F until enough fat has melted to conduct heat evenly. It boils off entirely, so it does not dilute the finished lard.
- Heat and finishHold the fat at a bare simmer, around 225-250F, and never let it smoke. The batch is done when the scraps sink and turn pale gold and the bubbling quiets, since the noise is water leaving. Those scraps, drained and salted, are cracklings.
- The sodaOne tablespoon of soda (the book does not specify which; period 'soda' usually means bicarbonate) to five gallons is a trace amount, probably intended to neutralize free fatty acids in fat that has sat around. It is not necessary with fresh fat from a butcher, and at home-batch scale the quantity is too small to measure meaningfully. The warning about foaming over is real if you do use it.
- Strain twicePour through a fine sieve lined with two layers of cheesecloth. Scraps of meat and moisture left behind will make stored lard spoil and smell off much sooner.
- StorageStone jars in a cool cellar were the period's refrigeration. Use clean glass jars and keep them in the refrigerator for several months or the freezer for a year. Properly rendered leaf lard sets snow-white and firm; any gray tinge or sour smell means it should go.
- The intestinal fatThe long soak, separate rendering, and winter-long freeze described for gut fat and "flabby pieces" were a thrift measure for whole-hog butchery. There is little reason to bother with it now, and this grade of fat is rarely sold separately.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) belonged to a farm world where a household killed its own hogs in the first hard cold of December and had a few days to convert several hundred pounds of animal into food that would keep until spring. Lard was the whole reason for the fat: it was the frying medium, the shortening, the seal poured over potted meat, and the base for soap made from whatever was too strong to eat. The careful distinction here between leaf lard, back fat, and the "strong" fat from around the intestines is a grading system, sorting one animal's fat into cooking grades from finest to barely tolerable, with nothing thrown away. Commercial hydrogenated vegetable shortening arrived in American kitchens in the early twentieth century, one of several changes e alongside the end of home butchery and the move to cities that left home rendering behind, which is why the book's instructions for cutting and curing meats read today as an artifact rather than a set of household chores.