Why My Mother Never Stopped Cooking With Lard (And Why You Should Start)

Find All my recipes in one place! Otis Granger Cook Book: https://otisgranger.com/ There's a tin can in almost every farm cellar I clear — size of a five-gallon bucket, wire bail handle — always full of nails or old doorknobs, and nobody in the family knows what it was for. It's a lard can. And there was a time when what was in it went into nearly every meal a farm ate for a year. My mother cooked with lard every day of her life. Pie crust, biscuits, fried chicken, pork chops, the potatoes in the morning. And somewhere between her kitchen and yours, the whole country decided lard was something to be ashamed of. I'm Otis. Forty years of barns and estate auctions across the Midwest, and the kitchen is the last room I clear. In this one: what lard actually is (one ingredient) and butchering day at the kettle — why it disappeared, and it wasn't because anyone found anything wrong with it (1911, a factory, and a lot of free cookbooks) — the numbers people have backwards: lard has LESS saturated fat than butter — why it fries so clean and crisp — why it makes the tenderest, flakiest crust there is (no water, and bigger crystals) — the brick at the grocery store, and the word on the label to look for — how to render your own, and the one rule that keeps it snow white and tasting of nothing — and the eighth piece: the secret in my mother's pie crust, which almost nobody alive has even heard of. Leaf lard. She kept it in its own crock, and it was for pie and nothing else. Honest, said plainly in the video: lard is fat, not health food, and I'm not a doctor. Half butter, half lard is a great crust too. Did your mother cook with lard — and did she know about leaf lard? What did she make that nobody can make the same since? Tell me, and tell me her name. I read every one.