In Praise of Lard

A few weeks ago I bought some lard. In part because it was there, in part because of Rob Cockerham's pioneering work with lard, and in part because of the now famous 10 point austerity plan, which lacked lard in the original version. I was toying with making pemmican, Rutstrum style, to augment our diet of squirrel.

Lard is rendered pig fat, and back in the old days was perhaps nearly as common as flour and salt. I don't know if they had corn oil, or Crisco, but they did have pigs, and pigs have lard. Lard is still regarded as the best fat with which to make flaky pie crusts and fry donuts.



Before I tried making pemmican, I thought I would try Indian Fry Bread, which, thank goodness, is not called Native American Fry Bread. Yet.

First I got the lard melted and hot. Wait, let me back up. First I waited until Joey was out of the house for the evening. She and her Mom went to enrichment meeting. Then I melted the lard and got it hot while I mixed up the flour, water, salt and baking powder.

It was about this time when I congratulated myself on waiting for Joey to leave. For a while on my mission I was in San Antonio, Texas, in America, and we taught a family that lived near a dog food processing plant. The smell was something else. The lard does not smell like that. Have you ever smelled a wet dog? The lard didn't smell like that either. In some towns people bring law suits against pig farms because of the reek of pig manure. No one, to my knowledge, has ever sued lard for stinking. And yet, as I melted that pound of lard on the stove I was reminded of all these smells. They seemed to combine in a particularly hellish way, made more maddening because the odor was simultaneously faint, yet inescapable. It stuck to everything. I had started down the path to my very own episode of Steve, don't eat it!

I had no choice, I had to follow through. Strangely, the frybread looked good, and smelled good, without the wet-dog, rendering-plant, burning-hair, pig-crap smell that the lard had. I put on a little honey, and bit in to it. It tasted good. Really good. Granted, it sat in my stomach like a 16 pound shot, but it was filling.

When Joey got home, she walked in the door and I started counting: one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc. 16 seconds later she stopped, sniffed loudly, and looked around with a startled look on her face. But this is what is so cool. She didn't say anything. She didn't mock me, or accuse me of boiling a rat, or anything like that. She just moved on, and about a half hour later casually asked me what I had been cooking, but in a totally pleasant way. She is awesome, and so was the frybread, despite the iron stench that clung to the condemned trailer for the next three days.