How to render suet for cooking

Back when I first started this blog, I learned a few things right away about historical cooking. First, some old recipes are very similar to their modern counterparts (like pie). Second, animal fat is wonderful. From salt pork to lard, it's all delicious.

Lard may have fallen out of favor with the onset of fat-free food, but used sparingly, it can make all the difference in a recipe. It gives pastry dough that beautiful flaky texture, and it adds depth to dishes when used to grease pans before cooking or baking. Historical cooks knew this well, since they didn't have margarine or canola oil at hand (though butter was a delicious alternative). Today, it turns out there's a small but thriving population of cooks who use (and talk about) animal fat regularly, including those paleo enthusiasts who only eat what our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have eaten. (We're talking waaay back when.)

You can substitute butter for animal fat in most historical recipes, but if you'd like to see what all the fuss is about, you'll need to prepare the fat. Alas, this was a hard-learned lesson for me, one that explains why I had so much trouble making those delicious apple turnovers a few years ago. But you, ah! dear reader, you can benefit from my experience.

First, you need to find out what kind of animal fat you're dealing with. In the United States, you'll most likely wind up with one of two kinds:

• Suet, or raw beef or lamb fat
• Lard, or pig fat (can be rendered or not)

If you are lucky enough to wind up with rendered lard, your job is done! You can proceed directly to your favorite recipe. If you have suet or unrendered lard, you have a little more work to do.

Rendering fat refers to processing "waste" animal products, like the fat around kidneys (suet), into an edible form. If you look at raw suet, you'll see why: it's stringy and piece-y, and hard to work with. You need to cook it and remove the sinews in order to use it. (Whereas I just worked in bits of raw suet to the turnovers...a difficult enterprise.) Here's what to do:

1. Chop the suet or lard into small dice, removing as many sinews and tissues as possible.

2. Place a heavy Dutch oven over medium-low heat. Pour in enough water to cover the bottom of the pot, and place the diced fat in the pot.

3. Heat, stirring occasionally, until the fat has completely dissolved into something that looks like oil and there are little browned bits floating around in it. Time varies wildly; it took me about an hour and a half to render 1/4 lb of lamb suet, but that's also because I had to start over.

4. Strain through a cheesecloth to remove all the browned bits.

5. Store in a jar or other container and let harden, then refrigerate indefinitely.

Then try it out in your favorite recipe and see what you think. It's different! Do any of you cook with animal fat? What do you like about it?

Why I love historical recipes

I've been chronicling my adventures in historical cooking for almost two years now (!), but it wasn't until recently that I began to wonder why. I love history, isn't that enough? Well, yeah, but what's the bigger picture? Why does it matter to cook from old recipes?

Here are a few of the answers I've come up with. Yes, they're fun and strange and sometimes all too familiar, but they also have a lot to do with respecting the past and thinking mindfully about everyday life.

• Historical recipes are often made with whole foods. In the book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan famously wrote, "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." By this he meant to avoid overly processed foods, items with unpronounceable ingredients, or foods with catchy marketing names, like Go-Gurt. In a recent interview he explains further: we should try to eat foods that were around before the post-WWII food manufacturing boom. That way you have a better chance of consuming more natural foods--that is, foods closer to their natural state, something Josh and I have been trying to do. Recipes from the pre-WWII era are more likely to include fresh, whole veggies, fruits, and meats.


• They teach me to be a more flexible cook. Before the late nineteenth century, most cookbooks assumed women knew their way around a kitchen. Mothers taught their daughters how to cook, and recipes just fleshed out their repertoires. Cookbook writers rarely used exact measurements, instead telling women to take a "bit" of cooked fish or a "handful" of flour. Baking was a different story--writers were more precise, probably because of the proportions necessary to make sure bread rose and pie crust didn't collapse--but women were meant to use their intuition and years of experience when cooking. I'm a notorious recipe-reader, and it's scary to eyeball a spoonful of herbs instead of measuring them exactly. What if the food turns out too salty or too bland? But I'm slowly letting go of exactness, encouraged by the reassuring lack of measurements in old recipes. And for the most part, the food turns out okay.


• They teach me to enjoy meals more. Nineteenth-century meals were elaborate, and most families of even modest means tried to enjoy dinner together. Sitting down together at the dinner table showed respect for the time it took to make the meal. Today it's all too easy for Josh and me to gobble down dinner in front of the latest Supernatural episode, but we try to sit down at the table when I cook from an old recipe. We have a chance to catch up on our days and talk as though we have all the time in the world.


• They help me appreciate how far we've come. Laura Ingalls Wilder had to subsist on salt pork because there were no refrigerators and few slaughtering animals on the prairie. Pieces of fatback were salted beyond recognition so they would keep for long periods of time. Yes, salt pork is delicious, but it gets old after a while. I really appreciate purchasing a small piece of fresh meat from the grocery store or the farmers' market and keeping it in the fridge until I'm ready to cook. Similarly, I love my gas stove and oven. So much easier than slaving over a hot fire every day (including the dead of summer!).


• They give me respect for the women who came before me. Notice how I refer to most cooks as "women." For centuries and centuries, women have been the ones to cook meals for their families, using the very recipes I write about here. But I have it easier, because I have my handy gas stove and oven, refrigerator and freezer, and inexpensive "luxury" items. I cook for two people. Half the time Josh cooks instead, and we divide dish-washing duties. The women before me had no such luxuries, and they cooked three meals a day, seven days a week, often with only their daughters to help. They fed large families, on top of washing laundry, cleaning house, and raising their children. And their husbands probably didn't offer to cook. Women of the past were truly indomitable.

Boiled ham (or, a foray into Eastern Europe)

Sometimes I think way too hard about how to use up leftovers. The potential for waste bothers me. If we have half a head of red cabbage sitting in the crisper because Josh realized he really, really hates cabbage after a disastrous night of fish tacos, I have this deep-seated urge to use it up. And not just in any old random dish. It has to complement the rest of the meal I'm putting together. (See? Told you it's a lot of work. Which is entirely due to my unrealistic exacting standards.)

So the other day, when I was planning a meal around 18th-century boiled ham, I decided to use up said red cabbage and some fennel and goat cheese that was lying around. The flavors and textures seemed like appropriate complements to the meatiness of the ham. I sauteed the cabbage and some sliced onion in a little olive oil until soft, then covered it in leftover sour cream and baked it for about 20 minutes in a hot oven. Meanwhile, I sliced the fennel into thin strips and sauteed that in a mixture of olive oil and butter just until browned, following a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi's wonderful Plenty. While the ham boiled away in a big pot of water (seriously, that is the only instruction), I caramelized the browned fennel and tossed the resulting fragrant mixture with the leftover goat cheese. Once the meat was finished, it was time to plate the food with a bit of cheddar cheese bread from our favorite bakery on the side. The result was one of the more colorful plates I've seen in the dinner department.

Josh was hesitant to try very much (the cabbage debacle still fresh on his palate), but I dug in. And after a minute the flavors and textures all seemed to meld together and call up an entirely unexpected food memory: that of robust, satisfying meals eaten one fleeting spring week in Budapest and Prague. Somehow, without really meaning to, I'd channeled all those leftovers and one 18th-century dish into a hearty eastern European dinner.

When I was in college, I spent the spring break of my senior year in Budapest and Prague with the guy I was dating at the time. He was studying abroad in Hungary, and it was the first time I'd ever been east of France. I remember the food vividly: soft cheeses soaked in olive oil and garlic, apple tarts, a somewhat successful homemade goulash, and giant mugs of dark beer. We visited a medieval-themed restaurant in Prague, where we ate fried pork cracklings and hearty bread. (There was other food at that meal, too, but only the pork cracklings stand out. Understandable, right?) The food was so different from the less flavorful western dishes I was used to that it still glows in my mind as a turning point in my dining history. But I hadn't revisited those flavors since that spring.

The night of the accidental eastern European meal, though, I rediscovered those tastes. Sweetly sour cabbage, salted with bits of bacon; butter-browned fennel, faintly tinged with anise and tangy goat cheese; salty, toothsome ham. Like discovering a new ethnic cuisine, it was a window into a different kind of food world, and all thanks to the happy accident of trying too hard to use up leftovers. I only wish Josh didn't hate red cabbage.


Boiled Ham
(slightly adapted from American Cookery by Amelia Simmons)

2 lbs of ham
mustard, for serving

Fill a large pot with water and set over high heat. When the water boils, carefully set the ham in the pot and let cook, uncovered, for about half an hour. When cooked, remove the ham from the pot and let cool slightly on a cutting board. Slice off the rind and reserve for another purpose. Slice the ham thinly and serve with mustard (and eastern European sides, if you wish).

Helpful advice for new mothers

Over the past few years I've pointed out historical hints for illness, cleaning house, and other realities of daily life. These tips are often funny and strange, and while I enjoy reading them, it's tough to actually follow their advice. For example, an early 19th-century writer suggested a delicious mixture of onions, butter, pepper and salt, appetizingly named "water-gruel," to get rid of a stubborn cold. (I went for hot tea and Tylenol Cold.) Another writer recommended getting rid of moths by soaking the infested clothes and furniture with naphtha, a neurotoxin and potential carcinogen. (I chose the 7th Generation products and washed all my clothes by hand.) In the fall, the children of a friend were diagnosed with head lice, and I immediately recommended washing their hair in New England brandy, following advice from 1833. (She most likely did not take this advice.)

Now that my friend Emily is expecting her first child, it's time for some new advice: how to raise your baby the 19th century way! A recent article in The Atlantic examined how parenting advice has changed from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and not surprisingly, a lot of the guidelines seem unfamiliar, outdated, or even bizarre. Take the 1920s eugenics book that warned mothers not to think of unsavory things, like ugly people, while pregnant, lest their babies be born weak or impure. Or the early 19th century recommendation to let babies cry so they don't grow up spoiled. This is almost unthinkable today for many Western mothers--the cultural standard is for mothers to attend to their babies' every need.

Instead of leaving readers with these fun facts, though, the writer takes it a step further. Why did mothers let their children cry? She speaks with a professor of human ecology who helps her understand that because of different cultural realities in the 19th century, mothers had different expectations. Often women had so much work on their hands, from cooking over an open fire to washing clothes by hand to watching over many other children, that it was impossible to focus all attention on one child. Better that baby learn early to look after itself than for mom to let the rest of the family go hungry or unclothed.

This gets at the heart of what I love about domestic history: you have to think about the context of cookbooks, parenting books, and other sources in order to fully understand them. Sometimes advice that seems weird was actually the most practical and scientifically advanced thought at the time. That even goes for the tips I mentioned at the beginning of this post: no one knew that naphtha was a neurotoxin and carcinogen; they just knew that it got rid of moths. So why not use it? As the writer L.P. Hartley so famously wrote, "The past is a different country: they do things differently there." Indeed, they cook their food differently, they wear their clothes differently, they raise their children differently. But that doesn't mean they're wrong.*


*Well, except for eugenics. That was hard for many actually living in the 1920s to stomach.

Works cited: Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance by Cecilia Beaux.

Afternoon Adventure: Servant Life Tour at The Elms

I want to say something meaningful about all this horrifying news coming out of Boston, but I can't find the words. There's only so much sadness I can take in at a time, especially when it's on such a vast scale as the Marathon and a citywide manhunt. At some point I just need to turn off the news. Maybe I'm avoiding reality, but once you have the basic information, how helpful is it to dwell on tragedy that doesn't personally touch you?

Instead, I want to think about the still-beautiful things.

On Tuesday, Josh and I drove down to Newport to visit The Elms, one of the mansions on Bellevue Avenue. We listened to NPR for the first half of the trip, but after a while it got to be too much, hearing such gruesome details about limbs lost as we passed flowering trees and sparkling water. So we turned to a music station, though not without feeling a bit callous for enjoying such a beautiful day.

As we wound through the scenic downtown, stopping for pedestrians and peering at the porched and gabled houses in colorful hues, the sadness of the real world seemed to lessen. That only continued when we arrived at The Elms, the one-time summer residence of the Berwinds, who made their fortune in coal. Unlike some of the mansions in Newport (cough Marble House cough), The Elms is a tasteful spinoff of an 18th-century French chateau (but that must be an oxymoron in itself, right?). Lavish statues decorate the grounds and refined gardens, and the interior resembles a fine art museum more than a residence. But you don't get the sense that the owners were trying to show off their wealth quite as much as other Newport residents.

In the 19th century, Newport, RI became a summer playground for the wealthy of New York and Philadelphia. Families like the Vanderbilts and Astors constructed lavish mansions, which they called "summer cottages," and they spent their summers having parties and taking the sea air away from the city. They sent groups of servants to Newport a few weeks in advance to open up the houses and prepare for the summer season, and they hired summer staff to help out with the massive parties they threw almost daily. Today many of these mansions are still standing, and you can visit a lot of them thanks to the work of the Newport Preservation Society.

We've been on a number of "regular" mansion tours in Newport over the past few years, so we decided to go on the "behind the scenes" Servant Life tour. Instead of wandering through the lavish parlors and second parlors and bedrooms, we came in through the servants' entrance on the side, passing under wisteria grown specifically to mask the servants' comings and goings. We hiked up four flights of back stairs to the servants' quarters, which resembled dormitories more than anything else (and were not divided by gender, as in Downton Abbey). We went out on the roof, where the servants could take smoke breaks or hang out when off-duty, camouflaged by an immensely tall wall. And we plunged into the basement boiler room and peered at the coal delivery system, a long tunnel with its own delivery cart.

Our guide told stories of Mr. Berwind firing all 40 members of the summer staff at once for having the gall to request a full day off in the summer. Of 18-hour days when the Berwinds entertained friends and colleagues. Of Irish immigrants finding their first jobs at the mansion and moving on to bigger and better things, like working as seamstresses. The guide didn't tell as many stories as I was hoping for, but nevertheless it was a fascinating glimpse into the "downstairs" life of the Newport mansions.

As we drove back towards Providence, I could feel the solemnity of the real world creeping back in. But instead we rolled down the windows and let the wind ruffle our hair, and tried to stay in that bygone world of servants and wealth just a bit longer. Sometimes a historical afternoon adventure is just the escape you need.

Spring greening

Ah, spring! When a young lady's fancy turns to...plants?

Yes, it is all plants, all the time around these parts. When Josh and I go for a walk, I coo over the tiny purple stars blooming in the myrtle. I envy the flocks of daffodils cheering up the still-drab grass. I tend lovingly to the starts toughening up under my grow light.

Now that the weather is warming up, I'm slowly getting the plants ready to go outside. This is a process called hardening off, and you have to take the plants outside in the sun over a period of days, letting them stay out longer each time to get used to wind, sun, and fresh air. I've also started moving some of the biggest starts into actual containers for the official growing season. (You can see the results of using Cow Pots below--the roots just grow right through the pots!)

So far, I've had mixed results. The plants are hardening off just fine, but last week I left some of the snap peas and peppers outside during a rather serious few days of rain, which meant the plants went swimming. The poor guys got so waterlogged that I had to pour off rainwater on more than one occasion. But they seem to be perking right up now that the sun has returned, and I'm looking forward to moving more starts into containers.

And perhaps the most exciting news around here is that I got permission from our landlords to spruce up the yard! I've been busily drawing up plans and completing soil tests to prepare the yard for planting. Because we live in an old house (danger of lead) and the yard isn't huge, I'll be sticking with the container plan for my edibles and planting only ornamentals in the actual yard. But it's still tremendously exciting. Plus, it gives me more of a reason to admire other people's plants...right?

The Ancient Table: Roast boar

Obelix with dinner

I have this habit of getting totally immersed in whatever topic I'm teaching in history. The Declaration of Independence? Let's watch 1776! Ancient Greece? Let's check out The Odyssey from the library! The Gupta empire? Let's eat Indian food for a week!

For the past couple of weeks, the cogs of my "immersion" brain have been turning, slowly putting together disparate strands of information. We've just started studying ancient Rome. There's a stand at the farmers' market that sells boar. I used to think boar looked delicious in Asterix comics. (And anything that lets me refer to Asterix while teaching is good in my book.)

Finally, it comes together: let's roast some boar the ancient Roman way!

When I told Josh my plan, he said, in characteristic fashion, "Oh, boy." But then he realized how grand it sounded: roast boar! The manliest of dishes!

It took a few more weeks to get organized. First, there was the recipe. While I took Latin in high school, my translation skills have atrophied to the point where I need to refer to an English-language recipe (sorry, Ms. V.). I found the perfect book at the library, Around the Roman Table by Patrick Faas. According to Faas, the Romans originally served boar divided in three parts, but they transitioned to serving whole wild boar towards the end of the Republic (as they moved to an empire). However, I have neither an oven large enough for a boar nor the capacity to consume a whole boar, so adaptations had to be made. I relied primarily on Faas' recipe, which he converted from a recipe by M. Gavinus Apicius, author of the only ancient Roman cookbook still in existence. But I also occasionally referred to modern recipes for loin roast of wild boar, since the temperatures and timing were more appropriate to my experiment.

Next, the boar. My friendly neighborhood farmer sold boar in smaller pieces, so I chose a 3-lb boneless loin roast. A few days before I planned to cook, I let it defrost in the refrigerator. Exactly two days before I planned to cook, I rubbed the meat with a fragrant spice rub of crushed, toasted cumin, pepper, and sea salt. Then I let the meat marinate for two days, turning it occasionally.

Finally, the big night arrived. Roasting went pretty much as I expected, though the "low and slow" method recommended by so many websites left me tapping my toes, waiting for the meat to be finished. (This probably happened because I didn't let the meat return to room temperature before cooking.) You really need a meat thermometer for this kind of experiment--mine was invaluable. As the meat cooked, I prepared a rich wine sauce to serve alongside the boar; apparently the Romans liked their boar with regular and dessert wine!

We set out plates with meat, sauce, and rather more modern braised leeks and carrots. Then we tasted it.

"I love this!" Josh exclaimed. "I usually hate pork, but...I love this!"

Yes, friends, if you're not a fan of pork, then roast boar is the way to go. It's lean and moist, and it picks up the fragrance of the spice rub so that the whole roast tasted faintly of toasted cumin. And the wine sauce? Divine.

Goscinny and Uderzo weren't lying: that roast wild boar in Asterix really is delicious.

Roast Boar

for the boar:
3 lbs boneless loin roast of boar
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tsp ground black pepper
2 tsp sea salt

for the sauce:
250 ml red wine (a little over 1 cup)
1 tbsp honey
100 ml dessert wine (about 1/3 cup)
salt

To make the boar:
Two days before cooking, rinse the loin roast and pat dry. In a dry skillet, toast the cumin seeds over low heat until fragrant, about 3-4 minutes. Move to a mortar and pestle and grind the seeds with the pepper and salt. When you have a fine mixture, sprinkle all over the boar. Refrigerate the boar for 2 days, turning occasionally.

When you're ready to cook, preheat the oven to 500 F. Let the boar return to room temperature. Set the boar on a rack in a roasting pan and insert a meat thermometer if using. Place the boar in the preheated oven for 10 minutes to brown, then reduce the heat to 250 F and cook for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, checking the thermometer. Meat is done when the thermometer (or an instant-read one) reads 150 degrees. Remove the meat from the oven and place on a platter, then tent it loosely with aluminum foil. Let sit for 10 minutes to finish cooking and preserve the juices.

To make the sauce:
Reduce the red wine to about half a cup over medium-low heat. Add the honey and dessert wine, mixing well, and add salt to taste.

Carve the boar into thin slices and serve with the wine sauce.


Works cited: Welcome to Brussels (image). Around the Roman Table.