dianacooks.com

This from a recent issue of the Observer. OK, so he uses “fresh” and “honest” to describe ingredients, but I forgive him.

Either of you read this book?

Do you ever get these ideas in your head that you just can’t shake out? They become obsessions? This happens to me all the time, especially with food. I’ll convince myself that I cannot live another day without having one of those knives that crinkle-cuts cucumbers for pickles. Or I simply must obtain sunchokes. It doesn’t matter that a sunchoke has never passed my lips, nor have I ever passed a sunchoke at Stop & Shop or Shaws. I’ve read about them and Must. Have. Now.

It happened again last week. This time it was lard. Not the one-pound block mass produced by Armour, gathering dust at your local supermarket. No, I wanted the lard Jeffrey Steingarten (I think) wrote about, the cremede la creme of lard — leaf lard. Leaf lard is the fat that gathers around a pig’s kidneys and when rendered, is reputed to make the flakiest pie crusts, make the most towering biscuits — in short, make my baking life complete.

I called every butcher in a 25-mile radius of home. My original goal was to purvey a pound of rendered lard to fuel my baking fantasies. A few butchers had no idea what leaf lard was, a bit scary there. One butcher told me I’d have to find a slaughterhouse. Finally, desperate, I asked the farmer who runs my CSA if he had any intention of killing one of his hogs my son had been happily feeding all summer. No plans for a killing, but he did point me out to Blood Farm, a small slaughterhouse in nearby West Groton, Massachusetts. I called, placed my order, and as luck would have it, five pounds of primo pig fat was ready for me on Friday. I’d have to render my own lard.

Blood is a family name, not just a descriptor of what is shed at the farm. A fifth generation of Bloods runs the place, and they butcher for everyone from local farmers to bigger operations, such as Wolfe Farms, which sells its hormore-free meat at grocery chains in New England. I was afraid the retail desk would be in clear sight of the killing fields, but it wasn’t. Through a plate glass window, all I could see was someone in a white coat hosing down a hog carcass. We’ve seen worse on The Sopranos.

Industrial-strength plastic bag in hand, I returned home and began cutting sheaths of fat into 1/4-inch bits for rendering. I’d done quite a bit of Internet research on the rendering process. Many Mexican cooks render their own lard, and one super-fantabulous baker at eGullet had even graded her lard: the clearest fat for fine baking, the longer-rendered lard for frying. Sort of like grading olive oil. I promptly swiped the idea.

I used my 9-qt. Lodge enamel cast iron pot for the job. Poured a 1/4-inch of water on the bottom of the pot, added fat, and began to cook over very low heat. After an hour or so, most of the water had evaporated away, and I was left with clear fat, which I used to fill my “grade 1 lard” containers. As the fat continued to render, golden-brown bits swirled in the pan. These bits of brown are tasty morsels called “cracklings.” My southern-born mother-in-law was in town, and she quietly asked me what I was going to do with all those bits. “Eat them,” I told her. “With salt. And, of course, I’ll share.”

My second rendering produced four pint containers of grade 2 lard. All that was left were the cracklings, approximately three cups. I saved one cup for crackling bread (used a recipe from Edna Lewis’s A Taste of Country Cooking — not very tasty, I must admit), nibbled on a few handfuls with Oliver, then gave the rest for my MIL to take to Texas. I kept one container of my Pure Grade Leaf Lard in the upstairs refrigerator, and the rest of the containers are in my chest freezer, where they’ll stay fresh for up to two years.

So go ahead … call me a lard ass. Just don’t ask me to share.