No, come back, I swear it isn’t that bad.

Pretty much everything I’ve read about lard (rendering, cooking with, or both) includes a preface explaining the recent resurgence of lard popularity, the health advantages (and/or lack of health disadvantages), and the process of slowly transitioning from fear of lard to love of lard. And so, here is my obligatory version.

Lard has been on my mind for a while, both from retro recipes that call for it, and even from the occasional modern source extolling its virtues. Authentic flour tortillas, fried chicken, occasionally baked goods (instead of butter), but most commonly pie crusts.

Many of those modern chefs who sung praises of lard, however, simultaneously warned against lard you’d find in the grocery store, since it’s often hydrogenated, or not all “leaf lard,” and thus doesn’t have the right balance of “good” and “bad” fats. This warning didn’t necessarily matter, since I couldn’t find lard, hydrogenated or not, on grocery shelves around here. (I admit I didn’t scour Columbia looking for lard; it’s probably available somewhere, just none of the stores within a few miles of my house that I generally frequent. Lard just wasn’t an ingredient I considered making a special excursion for.)

My turning point came during a “Good Eats” episode where Alton Brown was explaining how he ensures the quality of his lard supply — by rendering his own. There’s even a FoodNetworkTV clip where he explains how, and also explains exactly why it’s a useful ingredient.

And suddenly it dawned on me where I could get some pig fat that hadn’t been hydrogenated or cheapened in any way — the local source of pastured pork products, Caw Caw Creek. (If you’re ever in Columbia, you absolutely must buy their bratwurst or chorizo, which are the BEST sausages I have ever tasted. If you’re not in Columbia, consider mail-ordering.) Sure enough, their catalog listed “Leaf Fat,” a quick Facebook question confirmed they sold it at the weekly farmers’ market, and a two-minute drive from the USC campus Wednesday afternoon made me the proud owner of four pounds of frozen leaf fat.

The cost is $3 per pound, which is actually a lot less than I pay for local/organic butter. A lot of bloggers who have rendered lard mention that you can often get it free from your local butcher; this I haven’t tried, mostly because I was also trying to support a local farmer. (Plus, I don’t expect to use vast quantities of lard — it’s most likely going to be used a few tablespoons at a time in pie crusts, so four pounds should last a looong time.)

The guy who sold it to me was extremely helpful with advice, particularly since Buzz was standing there saying, “Wait, what, you want to render your own lard?” (OK, yeah, I probably should have told him I was planning to buy lard in addition to more chorizo. Sorry, Buzz.) “We tried that and it didn’t work!” (I thought he was talking about his family, some time before he met me — it turns out he remembers attempting to render fatback when we lived in Indiana, although I don’t know when we would have been buying, let alone rendering, fatback, so we’re still trying to figure out exactly what he’s remembering.) He assured us it really was as simply as applying heat, not too much, over time, and it would turn out really great.

Buzz didn’t buy the “really easy” promise, but we did buy the lard.

When we got home, it suddenly looked a lot bigger. Four pounds of pig fat is a fair amount — imagine four boxes of butter and you’ll have a good idea of the size. Anyway, into a casserole dish!

It’s hard to see in the above picture, but the pile of fat chunks is about half again as tall as the casserole dish. At this point, I realized there was a distinct possibility that, once everything had melted, the liquid volume would be more than the dish could hold. The idea of overflowing lard starting a massive grease fire in my oven wasn’t very appealing.

So, we chopped it in two chunks and got out the second Pyrex casserole dish.

And yes, pre-chopped fat chunks do resemble brains.

After 30 minutes, a lot of liquid fat has started to run off the central mass.

After an hour, there started to be an apparent pig-fat smell in the kitchen. This was sort of like bacon, but without the salty meaty overtones you normally expect. Not terrible, but not delicious, either. (Luckily, South Carolina fall weather is slightly below 80°F during the day and as low as 60°F overnight. A good time to have the windows open anyway.)

The smaller mound of fat was completely melted and cheerfully sizzling, while the larger mound still had a ways to go.

I let the small batch cook for only a little while longer, and then took it out of the oven. Pulling a half-full casserole dish full of hot liquid fat out of an oven is a slightly nerve-wracking process. For this reason alone, I’d recommend a crock-pot or stove top method… however, there will still be a point where you have to move around a large container with lots of molten lard.

The large batch came out about fifteen minutes later.

You can see the cracklings (cracklin’?) floating in the rendered lard — those solid bits that look like bacon. I’d never tasted them, so I was intrigued, but ultimately rather disappointed. Wonderfully crunchy and (surprisingly) only slightly greasy, but there wasn’t much complexity of flavor. Of course, there’s no seasoning or smoke in leaf fat.

Oh well, I was really just interested in the lard anyway.

For storage, we ladled it into variously-sized jars. (I recommend a canning funnel for this step, because a plastic funnel will likely melt. They’re quite cheap, and are useful for a lot of situations besides canning or lard-pouring.)

Cheesecloth worked beautifully to keep bits of crackling (large and small) from ending up in the lard.

It needs to cool a long time, so we covered the jars with paper towel to prevent curious cats from either burning themselves, or spilling liquid lard all over the stove and counter. (If you’re wondering why the lard appears to be different colors in different jars, it’s just lighting and background effects. The darker the object behind the lard, the darker it looks. The jar on the left is probably most representative of the liquid lard color — pale gold-yellow.)

After cooling overnight, the lard solidified and turned white. That’s one quart, two pints, and about a cup — most is destined for the freezer (I don’t expect to use it THAT often!), and the half-pint will wait in the fridge.

I’m looking forward to using this in future retro recipes, and possibly even everyday cooking. We’ll see how it goes

A few online sources I browsed through while working up the nerve to melt pig fat in my oven:

National Pork Month tie-in inspired by Months of Edible Celebrations, and this month’s cookbook contest!

What I found interesting about this was that I typically associate Egg Drop Soup with Chinese cooking (or, at least, Chinese restaurants). Apparently there are European versions as well, which isn’t surprising considering it is basically just soup with eggs mixed in somehow. Clara’s version, which includes Parmesan cheese, looks most like the Italian variant (stracciatella), although it’s not completely accurate.

In any case, the recipe is simple. Sauté diced potatoes and onions. Do it in a pot big enough to make soup, to save on dishes later. (Economical AND efficient!)

Add water (or broth) to cover. Boil for a while to cook the potatoes some more.

Drizzle in scrambled eggs (which will almost immediately cook), then add whole eggs to poach (which will take a few minutes to cook).

Serve over toasted bread and sprinkle with Parmesan. Ignore the fact that it looks kinda lumpy and weird, it tastes really, really good.

It’s straightforward and could easily be expanded on — add vegetable or chicken broth instead of just water, scramble the eggs with some spices (nutmeg?) before adding them, sauté some bacon with your potatoes and onions, and so on. Or, if all you can afford is a potato, onion, and egg, just do it this way Don’t forget some salt and pepper, though; with only three fairly bland ingredients, you’ll need some flavor enhancers.

“It’s not expensive, and it’s nourishing” — the two centrally important features of Depression cooking.

So this is my heavily paraphrased transcription of Clara’s Pasta with Peas recipe.

Dice a potato. Dice an onion. Fry them in some oil for a while. Add water and let simmer. Add can of peas (including liquid). Add pasta. Add tomato sauce if you feel like it. Cook for a while. Eat.

This appeals to my haphazard cooking technique, because it’s rather vague about quantities. It means that while my engineering side is huddled in the corner sobbing because she needs defined limits on how much water to pour in, my disorganized side is cheerfully throwing things in the pot in the optimistic belief that it will turn out just fine. In things such as soups or stir fry, Engineering Side can just go dither somewhere else, we don’t need her right now. (I prefer the theory that a balanced approach to life is very healthy, as opposed to a sign of advanced MPD.)

The hardest part was cutting the potatoes and onions into pieces. And that’s really not that hard.

I added some turkey bacon because it has been in my fridge too long, really needed to be eaten, and I figured it would help round out the dish.

Dump in a couple cups of water, peas, and dry pasta, then go sit somewhere for 10 minutes while it simmers. This is incredibly easy.

It’s delicious. It didn’t need the turkey bacon (although the nice salty bits of meat did add variety). And it was totally awesome rewarmed the next day for lunch. Inexpensive, delicious, and with lots of room for variation — this is a totally great recipe. (And you’ll notice it was just a recipe that somebody made up, NOT some ridiculous concoction from Imaginary Expert at International Food Corp. That probably explains why it’s so edible.)