In short, without hogs, farming could not go on; and it never has gone on in any country in the world. The hogs are the great stay of the whole concern. They are much in small space; they make no show, as flocks and herds do, but without them the cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern.

Willian Cobbett was the British Contrary Farmer of the early 19th century. His classic book, “Cottage Economy”, has long been a favorite of mine, not only for the ideas presented, but also for the flair with which Cobbett presents them. Thankfully, Cobbett’s masterpiece is now available on Google books.

The book is a quick read - a riotous, opinionated, spirited romp through home economics, politics and health, beginning with a treatise on why the British “cottager” must at all cost put down their teapots and return to drinking home-brewed beer for breakfast! But Cobbett has a lot to say about pigs as well, and I’m not talking about the other white meat.

The cottager’s pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for, it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to boil out, as they call it; that is to say come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed high all at once, the hog is apt to surfeit, and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley meal, is the food; the latter rather the best and does the work quicker. Make him quite fat by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eats, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on solid fat bacon, well fed and well cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour or is fit for the hospital. But then it must be bacon, the effect of barley or peas, not beans and not of whey, potatoes or messes of any kind. It is frequently said, and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon thus made costs more than it is worth! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well that it is the very cheapest they can have and they who look at both ends and both sides of every cost would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on messes; that is to say for their own use, however willing they might now and then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potatoe pork.

OK, he may be a little over the top, but nonetheless he does have some good points. The best pork is from large, older, well-finished pigs, not the overgrown piglets the industry serves up. Also, peas and barley are the best diet to finish pigs on. Our pigs are currently eating this mixture of peas and barley in addition to hay and any pasture they can still scrounge up in December. No potatoe pork for our customers. And, oh yeah, all of our pigs can walk 200 yards.

Cobbett also points out, correctly methinks, that pretty much all of societies ills stem from country children not appreciating the value of good sweet lard. See if you can follow his argument:

Country children are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread as we spread butter. Many a score hunch of this sort have I eaten and I never knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently so hungry as I ought to be but I should think it no hardship to eat sweet lard instead of butter. But now a days the labourers and especially the female part of them have fallen into the taste of niceness in food and finery in dress; a quarter of a belly full and rags are the consequence. The food of their choice is high priced so that for the greater part of their time they are half starved. The dress of their choice is showy amd flimsy, so that to day they are ladies and to morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. But has not nature made the country girls as pretty as ladies? Oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and white teeth!) and a great deal prettier, too! But, are they less pretty, when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert Peel, “where taudry colours strive with dirty white,” exciting violent suspicions, that all is not as it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? Are they prettiest when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or, when their draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? However, the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. It is the system of managing the affairs of the nation. This system has made all flashy and false and has put all things out of their place. Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy and obscurity both in speaking and in writing; mock delicacy in manners; mock liberality, mock humanity, and mock religion. Pitt’s false money, Peel’s flimsy dresses, Wilberforce’s potatoe diet, Castlereagh and Mackintosh’s oratory, Walter Scott’s poems, Walter’s and Stoddart’s paragraphs with all the bad taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed and borne together; and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, as the fat of the adder is, as is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the Son of the great worker of Spinning Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors of Oxford, the author of that Bill, before which this false, this flashy, this flimsy, this rotten system will dissolve as one of his father’s pasted calicoes does at the sight of the washing tub.

Um, so, I guess make your kids eat their lard and like it.

It is commonly said that you can’t get pork chops to marble like a fine steak. That is undoubtedly true of pork chops from modern, ultra lean breeds of pigs fed a high protein diet and rushed to market at five months of age. But is it true of old fashioned lard hogs sent to market at a leisurely pace of nine to ten months of age? I think this chop settles that debate.

About three years ago we decided to bite the bullet and buy in a breeding pair of mulefoot hogs from a herd in South Dakota. If everything went right the boar would become our main boar and the sow would allow us to maintain a line of purebred mulefoot pigs. The reason for buying the mulefoot pigs is that they are the last remaining American survivors of an older “type” of hog, the “chuffy” or “lard type” hog. This was admittedly a gamble. Although chuffy hogs would supposedly have great marbling and meat quality, they are not as long as modern pigs and they have a lower proportion of bacon and pork chops. This is bad business. Bacon and chops are very profitable cuts. To make matters worse, chuffy hogs tend to have very small loin muscles, the muscle at the center of a chop, which can make for some meager looking pork chops. Chuffy hogs generally and mulefoot hogs in particular tend to give smaller litters than modern breeds of pig which is also a huge challenge to the commercial producer. Finally, chuffy hogs are smaller framed and slower growing, which means it might take us a year or more to get a pig to market (as opposed to six months or less for a commercial hog). So we decided to hedge our bets.

A friend and mentor of ours has a line of pigs he refers to as yorkshires but are really just “pink pigs”. These are solid farm stock, known to have large litters and good mothering skills. They are fairly modern in type, but not ridiculously so. What if we crossed our boar to his sows to create “meat type” hogs (another type of hog - intermediate between the chuffy and modern types - that has basically vanished in the us)? This might give us good numbers of pigs that are intermediate in length, have acceptable loin eye size, grow at good rates but still maintain some of the meat characteristics of the mulefoot hogs. It is commonly said in hog raising circles that your meat quality should come through your boar line and that’s what we were hoping for. But it took a year to raise the boar and then four months until we had piglets and then another 10 months to raise the pigs to the size we wanted and then….

… I had the perfect chop. Yay!

Traditionally, fries were fried in lard (pork fat) or tallow (beef fat). Then the naysayers came along and said that saturated fat would kill us so we needed to start frying in vegetable oil. But vegetable oil goes rancid quickly when subjected to the high heats used in frying, so we switched to hydrogenated vegetable oils that, it turns out, kill us. So kind of a swing and a miss on that one.

Recently, butter has made resurgence and olive oil is all of the rage, but neither one is a great oil for frying. Both have distinctive flavors that alter the taste of your fries and are prone to burning, especially butter. Furthermore, olive oil isn’t exactly a local product if you live in upstate New York. Vegetable oils tend to be high in polyunsaturated fats, which oxidize and break down during high heat cooking, forming trans fats and other weird stuff.

Which brings us full circle back to lard. Lard is a locally produced fat that has a neutral flavor when used for frying. It is low in polyunsaturated fats, so it is fairly stable at high temperatures. It is significantly higher in the “healthful” monounsaturated fats than either vegetable oils or butter and we think that lard from pastured hogs is a uniquely good source of vitamin D.

Maybe the best way to think about the fat composition of lard is that it closely resembles a mixture of half butter and half olive oil. So if you’re already using butter and olive oil - and I’m sure that many of you are - you really have nothing to worry about form lard. Look, I made a graph of it:

But what about saturated fat? Lard does contain 30 to 40 percent saturated fat, significantly more than olive oil, but significantly less than butter. I would argue that saturated fat has been largely exonerated in recent health studies. Just off the top of my head, the French Paradox is still waiting to be explained, the Nurses Health Study found no correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart disease risk after following 80,000 nurses for 20 years, the recent McMaster university exhaustive review of the literature found no consistent correlation between saturated fat consumption and heart disease and low carb diets have been shown to improve cholesterol levels. (I don’t really believe the cholesterol stuff either, but this is not the place for that discussion.) I think we can safely conclude that if dietary intake of saturated fat plays a role in the progression of heart disease at all, it is a secondary role. Saturated fat has been wrongly victimized.

The Potatoes

All right! Let’s stop worrying about our health and start thinking about making some delicious fried potatoes. I’ve been working on a recipe that anyone with moderate cooking skills can consistently make at home without any special equipment and I think I’ve gotten it pretty well down.

I have several tips:

1. Slice your potatoes thin. This slices cook faster and are easier to crisp. A sharp knife helps.
2. Double fry. It’s hard to get the potatoes crispy on the first shot. Fry them until they begin to brown. Remove from the fat and let them cool. When you put them back in the hot oil they will crisp right up.
3. Use good potatoes. Ask the farmer which potatoes are best for frying. I have used Sabol Farm’s Goldens and Muddy Fingers’ Germans to good effect.

OK, so here goes. Thin sliced potatoes are easier:

Slowly melt your lard in a frying pan. I use about a half pound of lard in an eight inch cast iron skillet. The more you use, the less the heat will drop when you add your potatoes which means less greasy potatoes. When the lard has all melted, you can turn the heat up to medium high. When you see a few whisps of white smoke it is time to add the potatoes. I like to add the slices one at a time so they don’t stick. Keep your heat on medium high to high. The potatoes will drop the oil temperature and we’ll need the heat to bring it back up. Watch again for whisps of smoke (not steam) from the oil and you can back the heat off to medium or so.

You can flip the potatoes once they’re nicely browned on the side that’s facing down, after 3-5 minutes. Cook them another 3-5 minutes until they are looking nicely browned all over. Remove them from the oil and drain them on some paper towels. At this point they’ll look nice, but unless you sliced them really thin they won’t be crispy yet. Set them aside to cool while you make any other dishes to be served.

When the potatoes have cooled and you’re finishing up the accompaniments, heat the oil back up to where you see little whisps of smoke again. Add the potatoes and cook for a minute or so. If things are going right, they will crisp and brown up in just a minute or so. Remove them from the heat, salt them and serve with grilled The Piggery deli-sliced ham and Schuyler Farmstead cheese sandwiches if you’d like:

Despite the lack of forcemeats, the appetizer table turned out to be a really nice way to feed a lot of people for a special event very affordably, especially compared to a fully catered event. The guests loved it. And the best part is that if you’d like to do something similar, I can now offer to help you out with maybe a loaf or two of rustic pate. Or maybe some smoked sausages. Just let us know!

Yeah, OK, It’s getting a little close to Turkey day by the time I get this up. Better late than never, I guess.

This is a really basic stuffing with sausage recipe that I used to make a batch of stuffing that would serve eight or so. I didn’t actually have a turkey at the time, so I just baked it in a cast iron pot, as you’ll see.

Start by making a batch of cornbread. I use a modified version of the recipe in Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine:

• 1 1/4 cups cornmeal
• 3 tablespoons whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp lard

Mix the dry ingredients together. Work the lard through the dry ingredients with a fork until it’s thoroughly worked in. Beat the eggs and fold the beaten eggs and buttermilk into the dry ingredients. Add the mixture to a hot, greased cast iron pan. It should sizzle a little. Bake in a 425 degree oven until it just feels firm to the touch in the center.

Onto the Recipe

You’ll need:

• One pound of Thanksgiving Sausage
• One onion. I got mine from MacDonald Farm
• One small bunch of celery. MacDonald Farm
• One batch of cornbread. I made a double recipe - one to eat and one for the stuffing.
• Two beaten eggs
• A little cream

First assemble your ingredients:

Coarse chop the onions and celery, crumble the cornbread, and add a little cream to the eggs if you’d like:

Fry your sausages to an internal temperature of 155:

Remove the sausages from the pan and sautee the onions and celery in the drippings. Careful here, the cranberries release a sticky liquid in the cooking that can burn. When they begin to brown add a little liquid - this can be stock or cider, but I just use water - and simmer them until they soften, maybe 20 minutes or so.

Everybody in the pool! Add the cornbread, crumbled sausage and egg mixture to the onion and celery. Add water or stock until the mixture is quite wet, nearly sloppy. Then stuff it in your turkey! To prevent food poisoning, you should stuff it into the turkey HOT, right before it goes in the oven. You can make it ahead, just warm it up before it goes into the bird. I don’t recommend stuffing deep-fried turkeys.

I didn’t have a turkey at the time, so I just baked it. Magnifique!

Quick, cheap and easy.

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Merck and Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical giants, recently unwittingly pulled the last leg off of the stool that was supporting the house of cards that is the “lipid hypothesis”, the theory that eating saturated fat and cholesterol causes your “blood cholesterol” to rise which leads to a heart attack. The lipid hypothesis, also known as the diet-heart hypothesis, never really made sense and was never supported by the weight of the evidence. And now they’ve gone and toppled the whole thing.

Mind you, this thing has got a life of its own and its gonna take a while for the realization to sink in with the general public. But I’m calling it. The theory is now officially dead in the water.

Background

Like I say, the lipid hypothesis never made sense. The epidemiological evidence never supported it, ie the French Paradox. It’s no wonder that all of the large studies on the subject have failed to show the anticipated results.

It’s always been known that in European countries such as France and Switzerland people eats lots of saturated fat and yet have low levels of heart disease. These days we could also throw countries such as Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain into that category. Conversely, the highest rates of heart disease in the world are in Eastern Europe in countries such as Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakstan where they eat comparatively little saturated fat. In Uzbekistan, the people eat only one quarter the amount of animal fat that they do in France yet die of heart attacks at six times the rate. If saturated fat consumption is the primary cause of heart disease, how can you explain this? Interestingly, although it is true that in rural China they eat very low fat diets and have low rates of heart disease, there are subpopulations in China that eat tremendous amounts of saturated fat but still have very low rates of heart disease.

Furthermore, there is no relationship between blood cholesterol and heart attack rates either, epidemiologically speaking. If you look at the graph here, you can see that the three countries (of the nineteen included on the graph) with the lowest percentage of people with high cholesterol are China, the US and Russia. China has the lowest levels of heart attacks, Russia has among the highest and the US is right in the middle. Switzerland has the highest percentage of people with high cholesterol - more than fifty percent - and among the lowest rates of heart attacks.

Given all of that, it is hardly surprising that large scale peer-reviewed diet studies have failed to show any benefit to a low saturated fat diet. The Nurses Health Study kept track of the dietary habits and health outcomes of 80,000 nurses for over twenty years and found no benefit to a low saturated fat diet. The The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial (MRFIT) had men eat less fat, exercise more and stop smoking but had no effect on heart attack rates in the test group. The Women’s Health Initiative low-fat diet study showed that a low-fat diet does not prevent heart disease, cancer, or stroke, and that a low-fat diet does not aid weight . Other failed studies include the National Diet-Heart Study , the Los Angeles Veterans Administration Study and the Minnesota Survey . More recently, several studies have shown that the Atkins diet improves “good cholesterol” levels while leaving “bad cholesterol” levels unaffected.

Given all of this, it was a little baffling when the original studies on statin drugs - cholesterol lowering drugs such as lipitor - showed that they reduced heart attack rates. Now don’t get the idea that they will make you live longer; none of the statin studies have shown that. The small decrease in heart attack deaths are generally offset with higher rates of death from cancer and violence. But they do reduce heart attack rates. A little. In people who already have heart disease. Now why should this be?

We know that statins lower “blood cholesterol” levels and reduce inflammation. We also know that aspirin reduces inflammation and lowers heart disease risk by a similar amount to statins at a much lower cost. We know that the evidence connecting “blood cholesterol” levels to heart attacks is flimsy at best. So the logical inference is that statins work by reducing inflammation rather than reducing “blood cholesterol” levels. How can we know?

A Japanese study, J-LIT, was done to determine whether or not the reduction in heart attack risk from taking simvastatin was caused by reducing cholesterol levels. How? They split the test subjects into three groups: people whose “blood cholesterol” levels were not lowered by the drug, people whose “blood cholesterol” levels were lowered a little and people whose “blood cholesterol” levels were lowered a lot. There was no difference in heart attack rates between people whose cholesterol levels were unchanged and those whose cholesterol levels were lowered a lot. The two groups had final “bad cholesterol” levels of 200 versus 80 but the exact same rates of heart attacks. This is highly suggestive that simvastatin works by a mechanism OTHER THAN “blood cholesterol” lowering.

The Last Nail in The Coffin

Which brings us up to the present, or recent past anyway.

This January, Merck and Schering-Plough released the results of their ENHANCE trial that was supposed to show that their drug, vytorin, would reduce heart disease rates by more than Zocor. This is interesting because Vytorin is a combination of drugs, a statin and a new drug, that reduces “blood cholesterol” by two seperate mechanisms. This allows it to achieve significantly greater “blood cholesterol” reductions than a statin alone. In the ENHANCE trial, vytorin reduced “blood cholesterol” levels by 58% whereas zocor only reduced them by 41%.

Did vytorin work better than a statin alone? Of course not! That’s because statins work by a mechanism other than lowering “blood cholesterol”.

Don’t believe me?

That’s fine. You should check out:

The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics
The Fine Essays of Malcolm Kendrick, MD
The Cholesterol Myths
The Oiling Of America

Conclusion

Eat, drink and be merry! Don’t let the cholesterol cops run your life. The don’t have a leg to stand on. Be more like the French. They eat what they like and they don’t have heart attacks.

Now, you may be thinking, “Dude, maybe it would make things easier if you stick to introducing one new product at a time.” Which brings us to the question of what exactly are carnitas and pork confit. According to this, carnitas are “little chunks of meat, meat meaning pork, cooked in its own fat, with salt”. Whereas pork confit, according to this, is made by “taking a fatty cut of pork and braising it very slowly in its own rendered lard”. So you see, they are really the same thing.

There are differences between carnitas and confit:

• Cooking method: Confit tends to be fried in fat in the oven whereas carnitas is fried in fat over an open flame. Same end result, although carnitas are often a little more carmelized.
• Spicing: Most carnitas I’ve had has been seasoned simply with just salt. This is how I prefer them, but sometimes you’ll find them soaked in a citrus marinade or seasoned with aromatics such as allspice. Confit tends to be spiced with herbs such as parsley, thyme or rosemary. Ours will be seasoned simply with salt which gives you the flexibility to season it however you like. Trust me, though, they really don’t need anything.
• Preservation: Confit is traditionally packed into crocks, covered with the hot lard and then stashed in the root cellar for several months whereas carnitas is eaten fresh.

But the biggest difference is how they’re served. Serve them with corn tortillas, some fresh chopped cilantro and onions, crema fresca and Negra Modelo and you’ve got carnitas. Serve them with braised cabbage, mashed potatoes, a good loaf of bread and a bottle of bordeaux and you’ve got confit. Both meals are perfect for the right occasion.

We’ll be selling our carnitas/confit in medium sized chunks in a tub with a little of the cooking fat. They can be served cold or you can heat them up in some of the fat in a pan on the stove. Either way, it is traditional to shred them with a fork before serving.