That’s a thought I ran across among the comments responding to a post over at Chez Pim, and it rings true. This is not the place to wade into the good-fats-bad-fats kerfuffle—you’re welcome to visit the Google for all you need to know on that—but I do believe that lard, when acquired direct from the source and not hydrogenated, is one of the good fats. That’s one of the things I learned in my research. (All of this might make more sense if you step right this way to the previous post for a moment.)

     I also learned that lard is the go-to fat for tamales, and that rendered chicken or goose fat, called “schmaltz,” was a fixture in its crock hanging above your second uncle’s mother’s stove in the Old Country. I learned that leaf lard is indeed the preferred fat for piecrusts (unless you’re not a meat eater). And I learned that there’s a variety of ways to render lard—in, yes, a crock pot, as well as on the stove top, in the oven and even on the grill (scroll down a bit in this last link).

     The apparently no-fuss crock pot-overnight method appealed to me, but I hadn’t used my crock pot in so long that I didn’t trust it. The stovetop method sounded like more monitoring than I was prepared to do that particular evening, and the grill was out of the question (I plead ignorance; in one of the very few cliches that apply to us, grilling is my husband’s bailiwick). Someone somewhere said something about the evenly distributed heat an oven would provide, and someone also said something else about low heat being better for lard intended for sweets, that higher temps impart a porkiness more suited for savory dishes. With my eye on that tart, I knew low and slow was the way to go. I have an enameled cast iron Dutch oven. I’d also run across a lot of folks who’d complained about the smell, and one of them suggested the oven method mitigated it. It was close to my bedtime. The oven it would be.

     I’d had the two-pound glump thawing in my fridge for a day, but still, it took me a solid half-hour to saw it into half- to one-inch chunks. There was some weird membraney thing going on that required me to break out the scissors—in fact, my spiffy scissors that I’d always insisted would be used on nothing but fabric. I added the quarter-cup of water that many renderers said was needed, covered the pot and put it into a 170-degree oven, its lowest setting, and went to bed.