Lard for cooking and baking

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August 12, 2005

High on the Hog

By CORBY KUMMER

 

Boston

 

WHEN the New York City health department asked restaurants to stop serving food

containing trans fats this week, it aroused anxiety in some diners but joyful

anticipation in me. The stage might be set at last for the comeback of the great

misunderstood fat: lard.

 

Every baker knows that despite lard's heavy reputation (it is pig fat, after

all), nothing makes a flakier or better-tasting pie crust. Lard also makes the

lightest and tastiest fried chicken: buttermilk, secret spices and ancient

cast-iron skillets are all well and good, but the key to fried chicken greatness

is lard.

 

Dainty eaters who pay dearly for prosciutto but leave the ivory-colored ribbon

of fat on the plate infuriate Italians, who know that's where the flavor and

succulence are. Italian food lovers now live for the recently revived lardo -

salt-and-pepper-cured fatback, heaven on bread.

 

In the United States though, lard has long been demonized. Whenever I enter a

bakery (and I enter every one I find), I ask if anything is made with lard. Even

in Mexican and Latin American bakeries with Spanish-spoken-only signs, where the

bakers surely know that in their native countries the most savory empanadas and

the airiest tamales rely on lard, my hopes are usually dashed.

 

I recently got lucky at the wonderfully antiquated LeJeune's Bakery in

Jeanerette, La. LeJeune's is famous for its French bread, which in Louisiana

means a puffy white loaf particularly suited to muffalettas - the Louisiana

version of the hero sandwich whose bread is soaked with olive salad and layered

with provolone and meats like salami and ham. I wasn't surprised to hear the

secret of LeJeune's exceptional flavor and soft but pliant crumb, but I was

delighted: lard. The baker proudly led me to a tub of golden lard he had bought

from the farm down the road. I was looking at a tub of joy.

 

But when I went deeper into Cajun country, to bakeries down the highway from

LeJeune's, or asked at restaurants where cooks once swore by lard for the

lightest biscuits and fried catfish, I was met with the same misbegotten pride:

" We only use vegetable fat, it's so much healthier. "

 

Vegetable shortening, of course, tastes like greasy nothing. And there is ample

evidence, as the city health department knows, that it is anything but good for

you. Vegetable shortening (vegetable oil that is partially hydrogenated to make

it solid - the " trans " in " trans fat " ) did seem like a miracle in the early days

of industrialized food. Indeed, early in my mother's marriage when she spent a

month making a pie a day to perfect her crust-making skills, she used the fat

she grew up on: Crisco, developed by industry to mimic the virtues of lard but

relieve housewives of the burden of rendering their own fat. It was useful not

just to kosher-keeping cooks like my mother but to city dwellers, who lived far

from a reliable source of lard (any Italian cook will still tell you that the

only trustworthy lard comes from a pig you know). Crisco could be used solid for

baking, or melted for frying. It didn't need refrigeration, and it was

inexpensive.

 

Then came the damning conclusions of the first long-range studies of the

national postwar epidemic of heart disease, and the countrywide fear of

saturated fats. Butter, cream and egg yolks were the first to go, to the

heartbreak of cooks just learning the glories of French cuisine, and lard soon

followed. Besides, lard seemed old-fashioned - redolent of poverty and its

companion cuisines.

 

Now trans fats are considered the devil, and vegetable shortening is worse than

butter could ever dream of being. After prodding by nutrition advocates, the

Food and Drug Administration has taken the stand that there is no healthy level

of trans fat in the diet, and as of January will require manufacturers to state

the presence of trans fats on every food label. Now comes the call from Dr.

Thomas R. Frieden, New York's health commissioner, for restaurants to

" voluntarily make an oil change and remove artificial trans fat from their

kitchens. " What are beleaguered manufacturers and cooks to do? The loss of trans

fats makes things tough. It makes pastry tough too.

 

I have a suggestion for those Old World cooks who are wrestling with New World

advice: take another look at the fat profile of lard. It has half the level of

saturated fat of palm kernel oil (about 80 percent saturated fat) or coconut oil

(about 85 percent) and its approximately 40 percent saturated fat is lower than

butter's nearly 60 percent. Today's miracle, olive oil, is much lower in

saturated fat, as everyone knows, but it does have some: about 13 percent. As

for monounsaturated fat, the current savior, olive oil contains a saintly 74

percent, yes. But scorned lard contains a very respectable 45 percent

monounsaturated fat - double butter's paltry 23 or so percent.

 

As with all dietary advice, the fat of the day will change. But eternal truths

will remain: food is always best with little or no processing and eaten as close

as possible to where it is grown. This goes for lard, too. The artisan pig

farmers whose fortunes have been revived by a new market for pork with real

flavor should look into selling lard because the supermarket kind is processed

and dismal. And Dr. Frieden's request may produce a burgeoning metropolitan

market.

 

The health department is suggesting alternative oils including olive oil and

neutral oils like peanut, sunflower and cottonseed. Olive oil is a true gift of

nature, of course, and good for anything on a grill or from the garden. But when

it comes to cherry pie or fried chicken or French fries, excessive reliance on

these oils has the potential to clear both arteries and restaurants. Chefs and

short-order cooks can do everyone a favor - even the guardians of the public

health - by reaching for the fat that everyone knows tastes the best: lard.

 

Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

 

 

 

 

" When the power of love becomes stronger than the love of power, we will have

peace. "

Jimi Hendrix