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.

Old-fashioned remedies for everyday illnesses

hyssop

For the past week I've been battling a stubborn cold, drinking gallons of tea and piling up the tissues like Typhoid Mary.* Apparently it's impossible to avoid being sick when you work with middle school children, and all the more impossible when those students like to hang out with the toddlers on their snack break. Yes, the toddlers are cute, but they don't know how to wash their hands! Then again, neither do middle schoolers.

Anyway, last week my mind turned to medical treatments more...traditional than taking a dose of Tylenol Cold every 4 to 6 hours. What would those early settlers do when downed by illness? (You knew this was coming.) So I flipped through the handy American Frugal Housewife (1833) to find out the answers. Curl up in a blanket with your hot water bottle and honeyed tea and read on.


For the common cold:

• "A syrup made of horseradish-root and sugar is excellent."
• "Water-gruel" with onions, butter, pepper and salt, consumed just before bedtime.
• A tea to cure "inveterate coughs" can be made with colt's-foot and flax seed (if you can get past the texture).
• Drink a mixture of sugar and brandy to cure a sore throat.

For headaches:

• Mix half a spoonful of citric acid, "which may always be bought of the apothecaries," with half a glass of water.

For digestive complaints:

• A complicated concoction of saffron, myrrh, aloes, and rum. It sounds like it would take longer to make the cure than to wait out the digestive troubles.
• A variety of teas made from "succory" (chicory) or "elder-blow" (the elder plant).

For dysentery:

• Wine whey, a mixture of milk curdled with wine. Please note that you can make it "palatable with loaf sugar and nutmeg, if the patient can bear it." Perhaps the cure is worse than the disease?
• Milk porridge, made with boiled milk and flour. Again, nutmeg can help the medicine go down.
• A combination of table-salt and vinegar, dissolved in boiling water.
• Burnt cork, crushed and mixed with brandy, sugar, and nutmeg.

While these are just a few of the many, many complaints and treatments addressed in The American Frugal Housewife, I was struck by the fact that most of the remedies tried to cure dysentery. And that's not a common illness in 21st-century America. It takes me back to the days of playing "Oregon Trail" more than anything else: the dreaded screen reading "You have died of dysentery." But there's a reason so many players died of dysentery in "Oregon Trail:" it could be a life-threatening illness in the days of early settlers, as the Frugal Housewife suggests.

So I'm going to count my blessings that I have nothing more than a common cold. And that I don't have to drink burnt cork.


*Credit: Lissa.

Image: Botanical.com.

Nutrition, 1903 style (II)

Yesterday I posted some of my fan-girl thoughts on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and presented a nutritional table from The "Settlement" Cook Book. Now I'd like to think about what this 1903 table has to do with our eating habits today.

The interesting thing about The "Settlement" Cook Book is that it's just the beginning of nutritionism, Pollan's term for focusing on the nutritional value of foods. It looks very similar to early nutritional science (developed by Justus von Liebig), which proposed that humans need only protein, fat, carbohydrates, and a few other minerals to thrive. Mrs. Kander has broken down these "macronutrients" into smaller categories, as well as identified the foods that will provide these essential nutrients.

In examining this table, you'll notice a few other interesting aspects:

• She's not saying you should eat processed foods enhanced with these nutrients. There wasn't enough prestige attached to nutritional science yet, so there weren't very many processed foods on the market in 1903.


• There are very few vegetables on this table. Peas, beans, potatoes...apparently leafy greens were considered nutritionally useless!


• There's a lot of attention paid to meat, fish, eggs, bones, milk, and cheese.

greens, you're useless to me.

So how does this translate into the rest of the cookbook?

• Much of the "Vegetables" chapter is taken up by potato recipes.


• "Salads" often consist of lettuce with potatoes, meat, fish, nuts, or fruit.


• The chapters break down thusly:
• 4 chapters on meat, fish, or eggs
• 2 chapters on vegetables and salad
• 1 chapter on cereal
• 3 chapters on bread and fried cakes
• 9 chapters on desserts (!)
• a few chapters on sandwiches, beverages, and canning.

What's striking to me about Kander's cookbook (and her informational tables) is that focus on nutritionism. By 1903, cooks were already thinking of food in terms of its nutritional value. This has to be connected to the number of recipes we see for animal products (full of protein) and starchy foods (like potatoes). And I guess it's also connected to the lack of recipes for leafy greens, which don't even make it onto the nutritional table in the first place.

It doesn't seem to promote a very healthy diet by our modern standards, that's for sure. On the contrary, the meals would look a lot like classic Midwestern food: meat and potatoes. My parents ate a lot of meat and potatoes growing up, as did a number of white, middle-class families in mid-20th century America. It makes me wonder if Kander's cookbook (and others like it) encouraged this trend in the early 20th century.

However, I hesitate to draw further conclusions about 1903 Wisconsin based on Kander's work. For one thing, it's only one cookbook (hardly representative of a nationwide trend). For another, we know she created her cookbook to train immigrants in American cooking, so there are a number of biases and assumptions about immigrants worked into the recipes. Finally, the content of the cookbook may be dictated largely by the crops grown in Wisconsin at the time, as well as the ethnic makeup of the area.

But it's a fascinating exercise in culinary history.

Of course, we haven't even touched the 9 chapters on desserts. Just a guess, but those probably couldn't be considered nutritional...


Works cited: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food.

Nutrition, 1903 style (I)

Now that we've gotten comfortable with the sorts of recipes available in The "Settlement" Cook Book, I'd like to take a look at the book's attitude towards food. Before this project (and before I did some serious thinking about food and health), I hadn't thought much about the different ways a person could view food. My mom has sometimes said that you can either live to eat, or eat to live (she's of the latter camp). So for a long time that was how I thought about food and eating (guess which camp I'm in). But Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food opened my eyes to the vastly different ways of considering food and eating, especially in this modern age of Nutrition Facts and Enriched Foods and Minerals With Fancy Long Words No One Can Pronounce.

One of the first arguments Pollan makes in his book is that in today's Western society, nutrients are considered more important than food. Scientists have reduced food down to its nutritional components, which allows big manufacturers to enrich their processed foods with the "good" nutrients, and tout their products as "healthy." So we're encouraged to eat a lot of processed foods that are Enriched and Full of Minerals And Vitamins, because these foods are "good for us." He calls this concept scientific reductionism.

Pollan's ultimate point is that it's far better to eat a limited quantity of whole foods (preferably vegetables) than to eat this host of nutritionally-enhanced products, because there are two major problem with scientific reductionism:

• We don't fully understand how the complex variety of nutrients within whole foods impacts the body. We can isolate each nutrient, but each nutrient can behave differently when consumed with the other nutrients available in, say, an apple.


• We don't fully understand how the order in which we eat foods, and how the combination of foods we eat at any one time, impacts our bodies.

Pollan says all of this much more eloquently and convincingly than I ever could (and if it's not evident yet, GO READ THIS BOOK). But what matters is this: we've gone ahead and created a manufacturing empire based on science we don't fully understand.

So what does all of this have to do with The "Settlement" Cook Book?

Here is the very first page of the very first chapter of the cookbook:

There you have it. Back in 1903, Americans were already thinking of food in terms of nutrients.

Tomorrow we'll look at this fancy table in depth to see what it tells us about 1903.


Works cited: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food.