May-June 2016_nobleed

the Pork issue

photo by Romney Caruso

The 2003 cookbook “The Gift of Southern Cooking” is one of McGreger’s kitchen bibles. And no wonder: in it, Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock call for making buttermilk biscuits with “good, fresh, very cold lard.”Peacock, who is Lewis’junior by several decades, tells how the two chefs started exchanging gifts of food early in their friendship. Lewis would give him things like frozen gooseberries, damson plums, and “half-gallon Mason jars of lard, rendered by her sister.” In parts of the rural South, a Mason jar of self-rendered lard is as personal an offering as a freshly baked pie or Lane cake — because the lard likely came from a hog raised by the gifter or someone in the family. In Louisiana tradition, a family hog killing is a community

event warranting its own name: boucherie. Many traditional Louisiana products and dishes were born of the boucherie: boudin, backbone stew, chaudin or ponce (stuffed pig’s stomach), cracklin’, ti salé (a peppered salt pork), and hogshead cheese. Lard, which has a limitless shelf life when stored at cool temperatures, is used for cooking cracklin’, for making soap, and as a preservative. Vincent Fontenot, a U.S. National Park Ranger at Prairie Acadian Cultural Center inEunice,Louisiana,toldme that,pre-refrigeration, “You could smoke the meat and preserve it and it eat it year-round. You’d put it in these crocks with lard, and if you wanted sausage in the middle of the winter, you just opened that crock and pulled a piece of sausage out and eat it.”

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY maY | JUNE 2016