Ron Silver, the owner of Bubby’s restaurant in Brooklyn, recently put a word on his menu you don’t often see anymore: lard. The white, creamy, processed fat from a pig. And he didn’t use the word just once.
For a one-night-only “Lard Exoneration Dinner”, Silver served up lard fried potatoes. And root vegetables, baked in lard. Fried chicken, fried in lard. Roasted fennel glazed with lard sugar and sea salt. Pies, with lard inside and out. All from lard he made himself in the kitchen.
“It seems funny,” Silver says, “but for thousands of years this was the thing that people cooked with.
A century ago, lard was in every American pantry and fryer. These days, lard is an insult.
Read the rest of the story, “Who Killed Lard?”
Mmm, lard. It’s got kind of a strong flavor sometimes, especially if your pig foraged, but rendered it makes surprisingly good pastry and fried potatoes. It has a bad reputation, but the health qualities of the lard are directly proportional to those of the pig. And there’s no doubt that humanity has thrived on lard for much longer than on the oil chemically extracted from modified rapeseed (aka canola oil).
You can thank awareness of weight for this one. I remember my grandmother using it in everything you could think of. My parents used it very rarely. Today I literally do not use it (neither does my father). When it came to the push to “eat healthy” lard was one of the first casualties.
Unfortunately biscuits have never tasted the same as a result.