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Dripping, Clarified
Make the dripping hot and pour it into boiling water. Stir it for three or four minutes, then leave it to get cold. The impurities will all sink to the bottom, and may be easily removed with a knife. Dripping may be used many times for frying purposes, if it is clarified every time. Every little piece of fat should be melted down, and the dripping clarified. It may then be used either for frying or for household pastry. In making pastry good beef dripping is very much to be preferred to cheap common butter.
This is a rendering-and-cleaning method rather than a dish: it turns the fat collected under a roast into a clean, stable cooking fat. The technique still works, but two details in the original are worth handling carefully.
- Do it in the safer orderPouring hot fat into boiling water is the one step to change. Put the dripping and roughly an equal volume of water into a deep, wide pan together while both are cold, then bring gently to a simmer for a few minutes. Adding hot fat to boiling water throws scalding spatter, and a deep pan gives you a margin if it foams up.
- What dripping isBeef dripping is the fat that runs from a roasting joint, along with meat juices and browned sediment. Modern equivalents are rendered beef fat or suet; lard behaves similarly in pastry, though the flavour is milder.
- Cooling and liftingChill overnight in the refrigerator, not merely "until cold." The fat sets as a firm cake you can lift out whole; the brown jelly and grit stay behind in the water and are scraped off the underside with a knife, as the original says.
- Drive off the water afterwardsThe clarified cake still holds moisture, which is what makes fat spit violently in a frying pan. Melt it gently once more and hold it just below a simmer until the bubbling and crackling stop, then strain through muslin and store.
- StorageCovered in the refrigerator it keeps two to three months, longer frozen. Discard it if it smells sharp or crayon-like, or if it has darkened and thickened — clarifying removes solids, not rancidity.
- On reusing it "many times"Clarifying between uses genuinely extends the life of frying fat, but each heating breaks it down a little further. Beef dripping smokes somewhere in the region of 375-400F depending on how clean it is, so keep frying below that, and retire the fat once it darkens, foams or smells acrid. Fat used for fish should not go back into the general pot.
- In pastryDripping makes a short, savoury crust — good for meat pies, less suited to sweet work. Use it cold and firm, cut into the flour as you would lard, at about 8 oz fat to 1 lb flour; it can also be used half and half with butter for flavour.
The advice, generally attributed to Cassell's though the page itself carries no source, belongs to a kitchen where roasting was done in front of the fire or in a range oven with a tin set beneath to catch the fat, and where nothing rendered from a joint was thrown away. Dripping was a real domestic asset: it fried the breakfast, shortened the household pastry, and spread on bread with a little of the savoury brown jelly beneath it made a meal in itself for millions of British households well into the twentieth century. Kitchen fat was also traditionally counted among a cook's perquisites she was entitled to sell on — a custom said to have caused friction between servants and mistresses. The pointed final sentence, preferring good beef dripping to "cheap common butter," reflects an era before refrigeration and dairy regulation, when inexpensive butter was often stale, over-salted or adulterated, and a clean animal fat was the more reliable choice.