Render Unto . . .

I spent much of today rendering bacon fat into lard. Which elicited this comment from a dear friend: As someone growing up in a traditional Jewish home in Savannah Georgie, I am surely going to hell for my efforts. I don’t take her comment lightly.

If gefilte fish was the holy grail of jewish cooking during my youth, lard was the antichrist. And as I was slowly rendering this large slab of bacon fat over a very low heat (the process took 6 hours easily), all of my biases came flooding in. First, the smell of bacon fat, taking over my kitchen: I don’t know where it came from, but somehow I was conditioned from an early age to pick out that scent in other kitchens as a clear sign of danger, like indices of poisonous fungi. Then, the look of it, so foreign from anything I grew up with. And the taste? Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

And yet here I was, rendering bacon fat in our soul food kitchen, because? Well, because our buttermilk biscuits are just not the same without it. Not to mention our sauteed okra with heirloom tomatoes. Or even something as simple as cornbread.

I try to keep the usage down — for health reasons but also out of deference to my growing up years. Still, that slippery slope has long been slid down. I am clearly going to hell in a hand basket.