Take back the meat

Used to be, everything “lard” was evil. When I first began paying attention to ingredients labels, trying to choose the most healthy options for my table, lard was the worst offender, the most backward, artery-clogging, irresponsible ingredient imaginable.

Now, lard is the new granola.

An entire, alternative, take-back-the-meat movement has sanctioned not only meat eating, but saturated-fat meat eating. The way to rationalize this is that the meat is now what my son likes to call, “righteous,” that is, free-range, grass-fed and humanely raised. (check out Nourishing Traditions, not exactly new but, for Moosewood devotees, still radical-feeling).

I have been embracing this notion of modified meat eating for a while now – I bought a whole lamb from a friend’s brother who is a farmer. I eat Bright’s Farm bacon every chance I get, when I’m in Floyd County. I like to buy the occasional roast or steak at the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market. And I am thrilled when our friends serve up the beef from the cow I saw grazing last season.

Now I’ve even learned to embrace fatback – the mother of lard.

I first met fatback on menus, at roadside “Kountry Kitchens” in the South, at soul food joints in D.C., and I think I remember it at the school cafeteria way back when: it would be floating bits of white, adding flavor to soggy dishes of collard greens, or green beans, or anything formerly green, now cooked to death to a sort of olive-grey color. At the time, I thought, too bad to ruin a great dish like collards with the worst part of meat. And, hey, don’t cook ‘em to death, let them retain some green so you get a couple vitamins in there.

Then I met fatback again, this time in the frig at Misty Mountain. It looked like a hunk of white pig fat wrapped in plastic, like bacon without the meat part, only the fat. Which it is.

I figured it was good, since Katie (who’d left it in the frig), is a devotee of Nourishing Traditions – and it was from Bright’s Farm. But how to cook it up? Most recipes talk about cooking it into greens, but I decided to try it solo. I fried it up like bacon.

Wow. This is so good. Better than bacon. Rich but crispy at the same time, redolent with smokey flavor and a thick, smooth feeling in your mouth.

I knew this was a familiar food, even though I wasn’t sure exactly where I’d had it before. Then I remembered: when I was a kid in East Florida, I got to go to “the Lake” (was it Lake Okeechobee?) with my friend, Jeanne Drawdy and her family for the weekend. Her dad took us frog gigging in the airboat at night, and we had frog legs cooked over a fire for breakfast the next morning. And he slaughtered a pig that weekend.

I was wide-eyed over the carcass, and remember puzzling over how it was covered with thick, white fat. The fat was cut off and – yep – made into cracklins. Gotta love Google: I found this, and what I fried up in the pan is something similar, if not exactly the same (I think this woman’s fatback was not cured, the way mine had been – the clue is that the guy cooking it up adds salt, which mine most definitely did not need).
This link is worth checking out even if you’re not going to cook up cracklins – it is the most unpretentious cooking blog I’ve ever encountered. Much closer to real life, I’d say – at least when you’re cooking up fatback.

Which is among my new favorite things.