Daily Survival: The Lost Art of Lard Making, by Claude Davis

My grandmother kept a white enamel bucket on the back of her stove, and it was never empty. Whatever came out of that bucket went into pie crust, biscuits, fried chicken, cornbread, and the skillet where the eggs cooked every single morning. She never once bought a can of shortening in her life, and she never once had to wonder where her cooking fat was coming from.

That bucket held lard she rendered herself, usually in November, usually with her sisters crowded into the kitchen and the windows cracked open despite the cold.

Somewhere along the way we decided that fat was the enemy and traded her bucket for a plastic tub of hydrogenated oil with a shelf life measured in geological time. She would have laughed at that trade, because what she had cost her nothing and outperformed the substitute in nearly every way that mattered.

Lard in the Traditional American Kitchen

joy of cooking Before 1911, an American cook who said “shortening” meant lard. Every farm that raised a hog rendered its own each autumn, while the households that didn’t bought fat by the pound from the town butcher.

Chicago earned the nickname Porkopolis on the strength of it, and the wooden lard tub sat in every general store right beside the flour barrel.

You can see it in the old cookbooks too, since they assumed lard the way modern recipes assume butter. Mrs. Beeton leaned on it throughout her pastry chapters in 1861, and Fannie Farmer called for it in pie crust and doughnuts as a matter of course.

Even the earliest editions of The Joy of Cooking did the same, and only in later printings did shortening take its place. That switch came after Procter & Gamble put Crisco on the market in 1911, telling American women that hydrogenated cottonseed oil was cleaner and more modern than whatever their mothers had used.

Why We Traded It for Seed Oils

The case against lard was built on a theory about saturated fat that has aged poorly, and the numbers on lard itself were never as damning as the reputation suggested. Lard runs about 40 percent monounsaturated fat, which is the same category of fat that gives olive oil its reputation as a healthy choice.

Only around 39% of lard is saturated, with the remainder falling into the polyunsaturated group. That puts it well below butter and considerably below coconut oil, which is not the profile most people picture when they hear the word.

We gave up lard for reasons that had more to do with marketing than medicine, since cottonseed oil was a textile waste product until hydrogenation made it solid and gave an industry something cheap to push hard. Ancel Keys published his work on saturated fat in the 1950s, the dietary guidelines followed along, and by 1990 even McDonald’s had pulled the beef tallow out of its fryers.

The irony is that those hydrogenated substitutes carried trans fats, which turned out to be far worse for the heart than what they replaced, and the FDA finally banned them in 2018.

Even so, seed oils still earn a spot in a stockpile at thirty thousand calories a gallon, though lard, tallow, and butter belong in the pan whenever you have the choice.

The Art of Lard Making

Rendering lard is one of those skills that sounds complicated until the first time you do it, after which you wonder why anybody buys shortening. The whole operation needs a heavy pot, a low flame, some cheesecloth, and an afternoon when nobody minds the house smelling like a farm kitchen.

Types of Hog Fat

Not all hog fat behaves the same, and the old cooks knew exactly which grade belonged where.

Leaf lard comes from around the kidneys, and it renders almost snow white with practically no pork flavor at all. That’s the grade my grandmother saved for pie crust, cakes, and anything else where the fat had no business announcing itself.
Fatback comes off the animal’s back and sides, giving you a firmer fat that renders into something with real character and a mild savory note. It went into cornbread, fried potatoes, and biscuits, where a little pork flavor was welcome rather than a problem.
Belly fat sits between the two, since it renders softer than fatback but carries more flavor than leaf. Most cooks used it as their everyday grade for frying and general kitchen work.
Caul fat, the lacy membrane around the organs, renders fine but earned its keep another way. The old-timers wrapped roasts and sausages in it before cooking, because it bastes the meat as it melts away.

My grandmother kept every grade in its own container on principle, and she would have been genuinely offended at the notion of frying onions in her leaf lard.

How to Render Lard the Old-School Way

The whole process comes down to melting fat gently enough that it never browns. Cutting the fat into half-inch cubes gets things started, though a meat grinder or a brief spell in the freezer makes the cutting considerably easier on the hands.

Here’s how the rendering runs:

Start with a heavy pot and a splash of water. A quarter cup in the bottom keeps the fat from scorching before enough of it has melted to protect itself.
Hold the heat low, somewhere near 225 degrees. Anything hotter browns the fat and leaves you with lard that tastes like pork no matter what you cook in it later.
Stir every fifteen or twenty minutes. The fat releases gradually over two to four hours, and stirring keeps the solids off the bottom where they’d stick and burn.
Watch for the cracklings to sink and turn golden. That’s the signal the rendering has finished, since the pieces float as long as any fat remains in them.
Strain the liquid through cheesecloth into clean dry jars. Straining twice gives you a whiter, cleaner product that keeps noticeably longer on the shelf.

How to Store It

Properly rendered lard asks for very little, which is what made it such a dependable staple in houses without refrigeration. A cool, dark cellar holds it for a year, a refrigerator stretches that to two or three, and a freezer keeps it nearly indefinitely without any loss of quality.

The enemies are light, heat, and moisture, so glass jars in a dark corner beat clear plastic on a windowsill by a wide margin. Any water that gets in will grow mold on the surface, which is precisely why the old cooks were so particular about dry jars and dry spoons.

The Multiple Uses of Lard

Lard’s crystal structure produces flakes that butter and shortening simply cannot match. A crust made with half lard and half butter gets you the flake and the flavor together, which is how a lot of old recipes were written before anybody had to explain why.

Fried chicken in lard comes out crisp rather than greasy, and the fat strains and stores for the next round instead of going down the drain. Biscuits rise higher, cornbread gets a crust worth talking about, and refried beans made with lard taste like the ones served in the places that never switched.

Beyond the kitchen, lard ran half the household on the farms where it was made:

Pemmican from rendered lard mixed with dried powdered meat, which keeps for years without refrigeration and carries roughly 3,000 calories a pound.
Confit and potted meat, where cooked meat sits submerged under a seal of lard in a crock and holds for months in a cool cellar.
Soap made after the Amish recipe, with wood ash lye, which is how most farm families got their washing done before the store-bought bars arrived.
Lamp fuel burned in a shallow saucer with a twist of cloth for a wick, throwing enough light to read by when the kerosene ran low.
Leather and boot dressing rubbed into work boots and harness, which waterproofs and keeps the leather from cracking through winter.
Tool and hinge protection, since a thin coat keeps rust off a saw blade or an axe head stored in a damp shed.

Why You Should Get Back to Lard

The rendering chapter was one of the easiest ones for me to write, since I’d been doing it every November for longer than I can account for. Most of what’s in there came from watching my grandmother and then getting it wrong a few times on my own before it stuck.

What surprised me was how many people wrote in asking about it, usually the same question about why their lard came out yellow and tasting like a pork chop. The answer is almost always the heat.

You can learn how to make lard and how to store it in my new book, The Lost Skills of Independence, along with other 200 skills that were lost in the modern world.

I owe this book to you. Your letters brought half these skills back to me, and reading them was like standing in my grandmother’s kitchen again with the windows cracked open and her sisters talking over each other.

She’s been gone a long while now, though there’s real comfort in knowing that what she taught me didn’t go with her.

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