The New York Times recently had an article on Lard. And lard is back. In places like Mexico, it never left. I remember my daughter’s maids telling me how good lard was for you. I did not exactly agree with them, but I also knew enough not to disagree. Lard has been in the diet for 10,000 years right about the time they took up cooking bacon.
Understandably lard took a turn for the worse when Upton Sinclair started writing about the pork processing plants, and it did not help that he said workers fell into the vats never to be found again. I guess that was sort of like people being reportedly put in the cement of Yankee stadium.
Then we got all uppity ,not a racial slur, about fat in our pork. So all the fat was bred out of the pork. Then we were left with all of these tough pork chops, and the only way to make them tender and tasty was to put them in a salt brine. I remember when my mother used to cook a pork roast, she would put peeled potatoes around the roast and when the fat started to melt, she would roll the potatoes in the fat perhaps with rosemary. Those were the best potatoes.
Susan Allport, author of “The Queen of Fats” (2006), (such a great title), says that in the last century, use of corn, peanut, safflower and sunflower oils, which have high levels of omega-6 fatty acids, surged in the American diet. Consumption of Omega-3s, found in leaves and some animal fats, has flattened or fallen. Totally out of whack. I guess my daughter, NoName, who hates fish should be taking up lard.
And here is the best news, Harvard School of Public Health has reviewed the body of research and found that the type of fat you eat matters more than the total amount. No wonder the Brits eat these little meat pies at soccer games. For me, I am not going to regret those tamales, and I am thinking of making a flaky lard pastry, and perceive this as a service to my body. Lard is better than butter.
The trouble is that the American’s have bred all of the fat out of the pork. So it will take a while to get fat pork back into our diet.