Gone Trans Fat: Play The Lard Card On The Plate (1/2)

Although vegetable shortening seemed like a welcome alternative to labor intensive lard when it was developed decades ago, a new request by the New York City health department may put an end to its use. The following article states that lard's reemergence is a welcome shift to a healthier and tastier alternative. The New York City health department has recently asked restaurants to stop serving food containing trans fats this week. While this caused anxiety among some restaurateurs, some others could not conceal their excitement, because the stage might be set at last for the comeback of the great misunderstood fat: lard. Every baker knows that despite lard's heavy reputation (it is pig fat, after all), nothing makes a flakier or better-tasting pie crust. Lard also makes the lightest and tastiest fried chicken: buttermilk, secret spices and ancient cast-iron skillets are all well and good, but the key to fried chicken greatness is lard. In the United States though, lard has long been demonized. Whenever entered a bakery, even in Mexican and Latin American bakeries with Spanish-spoken-only signs, where the bakers surely know that in their native countries the most savory empanadas and the airiest tamales rely on lard, customers’ hopes are usually dashed when they ask if there is anything made of lard. Consumers recently got lucky at the wonderfully antiquated LeJeune's Bakery in Jeanerette, La. LeJeune's is famous for its French bread, which in Louisiana means a puffy white loaf particularly suited to muffalettas - the Louisiana version of the hero sandwich whose bread is soaked with olive salad and layered with provolone and meats like salami and ham. No surprise. The secret of LeJeune's exceptional flavor and soft but pliant crumb is lard. The baker would proudly lead dieters to a tub of golden lard he had bought from the farm down the road. But when consumers went deeper into Cajun country, to bakeries down the highway from LeJeune's, or asked at restaurants where cooks once swore by lard for the lightest biscuits and fried catfish, I was met with the same misbegotten pride: "We only use vegetable fat, it's so much healthier." Vegetable shortening, of course, tastes like greasy nothing. And there is ample evidence, as the city health department knows, that it is anything but good for you. Vegetable shortening (vegetable oil that is partially hydrogenated to make it solid - the "trans" in "trans fat") did seem like a miracle in the early days of industrialized food. Indeed, trans fat developed by industry to mimic the virtues of lard but relieve housewives of the burden of rendering their own fat. It was useful not just to housewives but to city dwellers, who lived far from a reliable source of lard (any Italian cook will still tell you that the only trustworthy lard comes from a pig you know). Trans fat could be used solid for baking, or melted for frying. It didn't need refrigeration, and it was inexpensive. Then came the damning conclusions of the first long-range studies of the national postwar epidemic of heart disease, and the countrywide fear of saturated fats. Butter, cream and egg yolks were the first to go, to the heartbreak of cooks just learning the glories of French cuisine, and lard soon followed. Besides, lard seemed old-fashioned - redolent of poverty and its companion cuisines.