A Cooking Life

Pig Fat Follies

My quest for real lard began about 7 years ago, when I decided to learn myself some Mexican cooking. I'd spent a few days eating my way around Chicago with a bunch of girlfriends, and a raucous dinner at Frontera Grill pointed up a glaring gap in my culinary repertoire (I'd wanted to cruise the Maxwell Street Market for the real deal, but our travel schedule got us into town too late on Sunday).

So I did what any reasonable cooking obsessive would do. I bought a cookbook on the subject (Rick Bayless's Mexico: One Plate at a Time) and invited a bunch of people to dinner. Finding ingredients wasn't too hard. For one thing, it was early September and I had a surplus of tomatoes, hot peppers, cilantro, and tomatillos growing in my garden. And I was able to order corn husks, dried chiles, and masa harina online (from the late, lamented CMC Company). The one thing I couldn't lay hands on was the lard required for the tamales and refried beans.

Sure, even the groceria up the road had turquoise boxes of Sno-Cap “Manteca”, but oh, my brothers and sisters, that crap bears about as much resemblance to home-rendered pig fat as Bud Light® does to a cask-conditioned bitter ale. It's an exemplar of the processed, sanitized, hydrogenated, industrialized “food” that's overtaken this country.

I thought I could just buy some pork fat from the butcher counter and render it myself, but at every grocery store in a 30-mile radius (and there are at least 3) my request for pork fat was met with laughter or incredulity or both. You think we actually butcher pigs here?

In the end, I stooped to the industrial lard and baked some country-style spare ribs in it to impart some flavor. The dinner was a huge success, and I even scored a husband out of it (a story for another time). But finding pig fat became my Quest.

Sun-Cooked Fruit Preserves

Back when I was first teaching myself about preserving and canning, I came across an old method for making strawberry preserves that called for setting the strawberries (tossed with sugar) on a tray out in the sun to cook down slowly and gently over a period of a few days. It sounded intriguing, but for a novice still struggling with the logistics of canning, it also sounded like a lot of extra work.

A Whole Lot of Baking Going On

Memorial Day weekend marked the opening of the West River Farmers' Market, where I am a vendor; I make and can a variety of preserves and condiments. (You can read about the trials and tribulations – and successes – of my inaugural season here on Mouthfuls.) I also like to include some baked goods to round things out. In gearing up for opening day, I baked two dozen Prune and Armagnac Tea Cakes and several hundred Coconut Cookies.

Both freeze very well, so those quantities could be expected to carry me for a few weeks.