My husband, the Fat Guy (not the Big Fat Guy yet, but he can dream) has always put it this way: “Look, chemically speaking, human fat deposits are more chemically similar to pig fat deposits than they are to any other animal that we eat. So doesn’t it make sense that we should eat, and deposit in our bodies, the fat that’s most like the fat we already tend to have?”
We get natural lard from a local farmer. It’s not deodorized, so it has a faint porky scent that initially turned me off, but that I have come to appreciate in many dishes. I especially love the flavor of cornbread baked in a well-larded cast-iron pan. It’s also my choice for frying tortillas or chicken (not fish though) and it’s what I add to the pan when I brown ground beef unless I’m going for an Asian flavor. I mostly use it for Mexican/Southwestern type cooking, and the occasional French item. It’s my second choice for frying potatoes, after duck fat, which I render myself (I only have to do it every couple of years or so, as I don’t fry potatoes very often).
I typically don’t use lard for pie crust (probably its most famous application in white-bread American cooking) but only because I learned to make a butter crust long ago and that’s what tastes normal to me. I think I may have to find a recipe for those Mexican cookies he mentioned.
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