ISSUE 78, CHICKENS, Part 5: Chicken Fat in Pastry Making
Chicken Fat for Pastry Making
When the Cotton Growers of the South put their money and muscle behind hydrogenated cotton oil products—Cottonlene, Snowdrift, Crisco—as shortening in the early 20th century, they sought to undermine the preeminence of lard in home baking. In a blizzard of print advertisements, the public was informed that Lard biscuits were “heavy” “difficult to digest” “too expensive” and “unhealthy.” Time would show that the transfats of hydrogenated shortening were the truly unhealthy lipids in the pantry. One effect of the campaign was to cause people not to turn to Crisco, but to chicken fat. The thinking was that (1) maybe the criticisms of rendered pork leaf fat had some justices, so we should try something else, and (2) chemically engineered cotton seed oil which had been purposely made tasteless was not the most sumptuous alternative available. Beginning in the late 1910s newspapers began publishing columns with titles such as “Try Chicken Fat for Dainty Pastries.”
Chicken Fat had one thing going for it—agreeable flavor. As one newspaper commentator of 1919 directed, “Use chicken fat the most delicious of cooking fats.” No one disputed the chicken fat tasted better than Cottonlene, Snow Drift, or Lard, though some claimed to detect a “deep” flavor in biscuits made with lard. There was one signal advantage, too, to chicken fat. Any home cook could collect and clarify the pool of fat that puddled beneath a roasted chicken. And roasted chicken was a common enough dish in the home repertoire to insure a supply.
Bakers felt most comfortable substituted chicken fat for butter in recipes. But there was a problem. The proportions were not equivalent. To get the same cooking effect as butter, you had to use 4/5ths of the amount of chicken fat as the quantity stated in a recipe. If you tried to do a direct equivalent, your baked goods would be too greasy, the cake might fall, the chicken flavor might be too intense. Butter contains water and often salt. Chicken fat does not. So adding a little extra salt was appropriate when using chicken fat.
There were liabilities to using chicken fat in pastry cooking: it would go rancid after a while and had to be stored in a cool if not cold place to retain quality over weeks. Its flavor did not work with some things—White Cake for instance—as well as butter. But bakers of chocolate cakes and spice cookies indicated that they thought the quality of the final product was remarkable improved by using chicken fat instead of butter. The USDA as part of its World War I Home Economics campaign urged the use of chicken fat, and reminded home bakers that “French housewives consider [it] the finest of fats for making cakes and especially puff paste” (1917). Now, a century later, we have become so TV-conditioned to seeing butter being laminated in dough for puff pastry that we forget that chicken fat had its place in some formulations of puff paste.
Among Ashkenazi Jews in the United States chicken fat needed no such advocacy. It was already a default culinary lipid, since lard was not kosher, and butter could not be consumed with a wide range of other edible items. So schmaltz became a frying medium, a baking ingredient, and a condiment. In Jewish Southern cookery perhaps the greatest revelation to gentiles is cornbread made with chicken fat rather than shortening or lard. It makes something already splendid revelatory. Ian Boden, chef of The Shack in Staunton, has been demonstrating how
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Sources: “Use Chicken Fat,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (July 1, 1917), 98. “Chicken Fat makes Fine Pastries,” Kalamazoo Gazette (February 28, 1919), 14. “Try Chicken Fat for Dainty Pastries,” The Montgomery Advertiser (April 30, 1922), 9.