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A Fat Confession
The person writing this post was known in her previous life to have filled her fridge and freezer not only with butter, but also pork lard, beef tallow, duck fat and bacon grease. Oh, and occasionally goose fat when I could bring some back after visiting my daughter in the UK. The Customs agent was mystified and amused when I declared it. All were used for cooking, not only pies and cakes, but also fried vegetables, roast chickens, salad dressings ( try the mayo made from bacon grease for your next BLT) and, last but not least, my famous French fries – which I do only a couple of times a year. After mourning the loss of my greasy treasures as part of the pre-move purge, I have tried to recreate these life necessities in Italy.
Regrouping Resources
Butter, as you noted from this earlier post is not a problem. It did, however, take me a little time to
figure out the difference between lardo and strutto. Lardo is the prized fat on a hog’s back (known in the US obviously as fatback). Strutto is technically a percentage of the same pork fat but is mixed in with other fatty waste from the hog. Apparently Italians sometimes use strutto as a condiment, but most often it is used in the way we use Crisco. Fortunately for the Other Person in our household, the farsighted pork manufacturers in Italy have realized that Pancetta Affumicata is basically bacon, and so they now market some of that as such in stingy little packets of six strips. For someone who has steadfastly refused to give up his breakfast of toasted smooshy bread (my Italian son-in-law refers to it as Pane Finto – Nothing Bread), two strips of bacon and two fried eggs, this was life-saving — thus fortified, he could survive another day of studying Italian via Duolingo. He continues to be addicted to his collection of their non-fungible Gemstones.
Trust The Brand
In comparison, to my fat largesse here, the only fats we had in the cupboards and fridges of my childhood were butter, margarine and Crisco, with an occasional bottle of Wesson Oil. Ditto in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, except she saved her bacon grease. I don’t think either of them used olive oil. Both my mother and my mother-in-law used the Good Seasons bottle of salad dressing, which measured the company’s packets of various salad seasonings, with instructions on how to make a perfect salad with little effort and a healthy glug of Wesson oil. But no salad dressing or cake mix had the staying power of a hog fat replacement called Crisco. It was ubiquitous in American cooking, but has in the last two decades come under some well deserved scrutiny.
When Cotton Was King
Crisco has a very lively history fraught with fiction as well as fact. One myth often touted by wellness sales people is that it was invented by German scientists in 1901 as a lubricant for submarines. The process of hydrogenation of vegetable oil was indeed invented in 1901 by a German chemist, Wilhelm Normann. But it was the nuisance of the residual seeds left from milling cotton that gave birth to Crisco in 1911. Huge mounds of seeds remained and cotton processors tried pressing the seeds for a usable oil. But, cottonseed oil was dark, quite smelly with an icky taste and was thus unusable as a grocery staple. Piles of cotton seeds were left to rot in fields, according to an article in The Conversation.
David Wesson (yes, that Wesson), a late 19th century American scientist, discovered a method for deodorizing and removing unpleasant flavors from cotton seed oil. Now newly tasteless and odorless, cotton seed oil was heavily marketed at the turn of the century as a cooking oil and later mixed with animal fats to create a solid and economical fat that could be used for both baking and cooking – often with the promise that this cheaper miracle shortening did not contain hog fat. Cotton seed oil and its by-products were marketed to the American public as cheaper , cleaner, and healthier than lard.
Brave New Marketing
In a new form of marketing, Proctor and Gamble created a juggernaut in PR with Crisco. By 1911, its in-house chemists had perfected the hydrogenation process and developed a white odorless, tasteless hardened fat, which Crisco – a shortened version of “crystalized cottonseed oil” – was marketed in a revolutionary way. The term cottonseed oil was rarely used in its advertising, but ads touted Proctor and Gamble as a trusted manufacturer of a healthier and cheaper alternative to hog fat or lard – the principal fat used in cooking. At the time, companies did not have to label actual ingredients of their products; they just couldn’t mislabel them. In fact, it was not until 1960 that ingredient labeling of products was Federally mandated. Proctor and Gamble paved the way with its novel marketing in the US urging consumers to trust the brand (which touted the words “clean, safe, economical”) rather than bother to look at or try to understand the complex new world of ingredients made available by newfangled technologies. Recipes were developed and marketed as never before – using Crisco as the headliner – and they worked. In a sense, it was the first expression of trusting a brand instead of a product.
Now, Crisco and its competitors are primarily made with soybean and palm oil – the mass cultivation of the plants that provide these oils have proven to be a massive environmental problem. But deodorized, clean tasting, cheap cottonseed oil is still used in commercial food venues for deep frying, and it is also a prominent ingredient in tons of inexpensive ultra-processed foods. Just check the label and you’ll most likely see “cottonseed oil” somewhere in the startlingly long list of ingredients.
While Crisco at the beginning of the 20th century virtually wiped out pork lard as a cooking ingredient, now in the 21st century, troubling scientific data and research have led us to take another look at hydrogenated shortening vs butter and lard. We have a new bad buzz word – trans fats. Non-dairy creamer, butter substitutes, microwave popcorn, a lot of health food snacks, and almost any processed food will have a significant trans fat component. Its health profile is far from benign. Now, lard is actually looking pretty good by comparison. I think I will make some biscuits with my newly bought container of Italian lardo. And continue rebuilding my stockpile of fatty treasures.
After owning one of the best cooking stores in the US for 47 years, Nancy Pollard writes a blog about food in all its aspects – recipes, film, books, travel, superior sources and food related issues.
Lard looks great except for any of my family or friends (or myself) who are Jewish, Muslim, vegetarian, vegan, etc. Crisco solves this problem. Also, I watch a lot of GBBO and was always baffled at dry cakes and needing to soak the sponge. I finally realized they never use shortening. Easiest way to make cakes moist. And no soggy bottoms.