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Lard, Preserving Unmelted
Take the fat from the inside of a newly-killed pig, rub it all over with salt, and let it lie for two days. Drain it, and put it into salt and water sufficiently strong to float an egg. Change this occasionally in warm weather. Lay the lard in fresh water for two or three hours before using it.
This is a preservation method rather than a dish: raw leaf fat held in salt and brine until wanted for rendering. It belongs to a household that killed its own pig and had no refrigeration, and it cannot be reproduced safely under current guidance.
- No measured salt, no measured timeThe whole method rests on "salt enough to float an egg" and "let it lie for two days." Safe curing depends on a known salt concentration in the meat, a known temperature and a known duration; none of the three is fixed here. Egg-flotation tells you only that a brine is strong, not what concentration the fat itself reaches.
- Raw pork held at ambient temperatureThe fat is never heated and never chilled. "Change this occasionally in warm weather" implies the brine was expected to deteriorate, but no interval, temperature or test is specified. That is not a control measure.
- Anaerobic brine and Clostridium riskSubmerged raw pork fat sits in a low-oxygen environment. Without a verified salt level and cold storage, this is the kind of condition in which Clostridium botulinum can grow, and the toxin gives no warning in appearance or smell.
- The final soak removes the protectionLaying the lard in fresh water for two or three hours draws the salt back out. Whatever preservative effect the brine had is deliberately undone before the fat is handled.
- "Newly-killed pig" is doing a lot of workThe method assumes fat taken very soon after slaughter. Supermarket or butcher's leaf fat has a different handling history and cannot be treated as equivalent.
- What to do insteadLeaf fat today is rendered promptly into lard and then refrigerated or frozen; rendered lard keeps for months cold and indefinitely frozen. If you want to store fat, use a current rendering and storage recipe rather than this one.
This is a preservation method addressing a problem of timing rather than cooking: rendering was hot, laborious work, and salting the raw fat allowed the job to be spread out. "Leaf lard" — the firm sheet of fat around the kidneys, which is what "the fat from the inside" means here — was the most prized grade, mild-flavoured and preferred for pastry, and worth the trouble of holding back. Brine tested by floating an egg was a common domestic substitute for a hydrometer in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books; it survived so long precisely because it needed no instrument.