Lard Ass

A few weeks ago, I did a bad, bad thing.

It was a warm Summer Sunday. Because of the heat and a recent vacation, my partner Jess and I had been doing far too much eating out. We were determined to have a tasty, home-cooked meal. Sundays are typically my day to get creative or ambitious in the kitchen. Jess threw out a couple of suggestions, most of them healthy and all of them a bit upscale. But none of them struck a chord in me.

I had recently been flipping through my new copy of The Joy of Cooking and stumbled upon their recipe for fried chicken. Any good cook who is a native of the Deep South is expected to produce great fried chicken, but it's always been one of my weaknesses. I was curious to see if this Yankee book could improve my Southern culinary skills.

They had a lot of advice and several, slightly different approaches and recipes. But the thing I found most intriguing was their suggested medium for frying the chicken: shortening. My mama always fried chicken in corn oil. Anything she fried (and that was just about everything) she fried in corn oil. I had never questioned her wisdom on this matter, despite her mediocre results. Maybe the corn oil was the problem! I read everything that Joy had to say about fried chicken, and at the very end of the passage on fried chicken, was a footnote: "Also try frying in equal parts butter and lard."

My fate was sealed. In its own, down-home way, this was the most decadent thing I had ever heard of. Luxury for the common man.

I was pretty sure Jess would balk at the butter-lard combo. So in the grocery, I sent him on his way for the vegetables on our shopping list and surreptitiously sought out the lard. Interestingly, I found it in the dairy case, right next to the butter. I had never noticed it there. Shouldn't it be in the meat department? I grabbed the lard and buried it in my shopping basket.

Once back home I headed for the back porch. Our gas grill has a nice, powerful side burner that we sometimes use when we don't want to heat up or stink up the house. This made it easy for me to conceal my strategy. In a big, heavy dutch oven, I melted half a pound of butter and half a pound of lard. What an interesting aroma it had. Did the rich meatiness smell appealing, or disgusting? I actually became nervous. Was I putting our health at risk? Was I a bad person? Once the chicken started frying, my trepidation disappeared. The chicken cooked, releasing its fat into the pig fat and the cow fat (extracted from the lactose that was meant to nourish baby calves.) It was the most heavenly scent of animal carnage I had ever experienced.

The chicken was just as delicious as it smelled. Jess polished off five pieces, stripping every morsel of meat, skin and fat from the bone. When he was done, I told him what I had done. Initially, he expressed concern, but that vanished in a matter of moments. He went back to the kitchen and started picking at the remaining pieces.

It was as evident as the night we met that my man from Vermont could not resist my Southern charms.