Simple traditional Christmas pudding (with leaf lard)

This is adapted from a video by Townsends, who are historical reenactors focused on the early American place and time and have a lot of great traditional recipes. As mentioned on our Cooking/recipes page, since “pasture-raised meat” used to be what everyone ate and knew how to cook, we think our meats often give their best flavor when cooked with old recipes and cooking methods. Of course, we’re not reenactors so we do use modern conveniences whenever we can get away with it!

You will need:

A very large pot with at least one handle

An additional means of boiling water

A clean, cloth kitchen towel without any holes in it

String

A large cooking bowl, a whisk, and a spoon

6 ounces pork leaf lard, frozen

3 eggs

3/4 cup milk

6 ounces AP flour plus plenty of extra

6 ounces dried pitted dates

6 ounces raisins

(optional, but recommended) a handful or two of candied or other dried fruits, such as candied cherries, candied orange peel, candied citron, or whatever you like

a couple pinches of powdered ginger and a couple pinches of nutmeg or about 1/4 nut grated

a few tablespoons brandy (you’re lighting this on fire, not drinking it. Must be 40 proof or higher.)

To make the pudding:

Fill the pot almost to the top with water and start it on high heat to get it boiling.

Dice the leaf lard into pieces ideally less than a quarter inch square, definitely less than a half inch. Make sure it is frozen first, the lard is far easier to work with when frozen. If the kitchen is warm, put the diced lard back in the freezer until you need it.

In the cooking bowl, crack the eggs and whisk them. Add about half the milk and continue whisking. Add the flour a little at a time and continue whisking so there are no lumps. Add the rest of the milk and whisk some more. Switch from whisk to spoon and add all the fruit. Mix very well. Add the spices and stir some more.

Mix in the diced leaf lard. The lard is a key ingredient. As the pudding boils, the lard slowly melts through the flour mixture, leaving small holes to aerate it and greatly improving the texture. You’ll end up with cloudy cooking water that probably has a lot of lard in it, but that’s okay. Whatever fat the pudding needs soak into the flour, and the rest that melts out helps the pudding have a smooth consistency and not turn into a boiled lump of gunk. Use raw, unrendered leaf lard (or suet from beef), not normal back fat or cooking lard. The leaf lard is a neutral flavor and won’t make your pudding taste like pork (though if you wanted to, you could probably include some candied bacon along with the dried fruits.)

Now add a tablespoon or two of flour at a time and stir it in very well. Keep adding flour and stirring it in completely until the mixture is very, very difficult to stir and all the flour is incorporated with no lumps.

Wet the cloth kitchen towel and lay out on a flat surface. Traditional recipes call for boiling the cloth, but wetting it seems to work fine. Sprinkle a good coating of flour over a large circular area in the center of the towel. This is to keep the pudding from sticking too badly.

Spoon the pudding mix onto the flour on the wet kitchen towel. The mix should be very, very thick and difficult to get out of the bowl.

Tie up the towel into a pouch with the pudding mix inside. Make sure (i) there are no gaps, (ii) the string is strong (use two just to be safe) and very tight, (iii) there is an inch or so of extra space inside the pouch for the pudding to expand. Leave a long tail on the string you use to tie up the pudding pouch.

When the water is at a rolling boil, put the pudding pouch in the water, hanging onto the tail of string. Tie the string to a handle on the side of the pot. Ensure that the pudding pouch floats freely in the water and that the string keeps the bottom of the pudding from sinking. You do not want the pudding pouch to rest on the bottom of the pot, as that could cause it to burn.

Partially cover the pot. Begin boiling some more water. Any time a significant amount of steam has escaped from your cooking pot, you need to top it up with boiling water. If you do not, the water level will go down and part of your pudding, held up by the string, will no longer be in the water and will not cook properly. How often you need to add boiling water depends on your pot. Do not add cold water, it must be already boiling so that the pudding continues to cook.

Boil the pudding for at least 2 1/2 and more like 3 hours. Realistically you aren’t going to overcook it, so going longer is fine. You can keep the pudding warm by keeping it in the hot water for a while after you turn off the heat.

To serve, remove the pudding pouch from the water. Untie or cut off the string(s) holding it closed and dump it out onto a platter. Yes, the kitchen towel that just came out of boiling water is hot. To check doneness, stick a long skewer through the pudding; it should come out clean.

Let the pudding rest for a few minutes to let some of the excess water steam off. When ready to serve, take it to the table and pour a few tablespoons of brandy over the top of the pudding.

Turn down the lights. Have a wet towel and a glass of water handy just in case. And a fire extinguisher, but you can’t eat the pudding if you use a fire extinguisher on it.

Light the brandy on fire. Yes, fire. Sing a Christmas song and admire the blue flames.

Most of the brandy will just fall down to the platter. Carefully pour it off, then light the pudding on fire again to burn off the alcohol. Slice the pudding like bread and serve.

(Optional) The pudding is good as is, but you can also make a pudding sauce. A simple recipe is a half cup butter and a cup sugar, combine in a pot and cook on low heat until the butter is melted, then whisk until the sugar is dissolved. Add about a quarter cup of heavy cream and whisk the sauce some more. Pour the sauce over the slices of pudding.

(Optional) It’s traditional to add brandy to the pudding, and you could certainly do that. The thing is, the pudding tastes really, really good on its own. Perhaps a better option would be to add brandy to the pudding sauce as you’re cooking it. That way you can control how much of the alcohol flavor you want by choosing how much pudding sauce you use, and the pudding itself can still be enjoyed by those who don’t want or can’t have the alcohol.

Easy pork schnitzel

No photos this time. You want photos, send us your own recipe with some photos with permission to post it!

You will need

1 pork leg steak

1/4 cup cooking lard. Real lard, not that processed garbage from the store.

around a cup of flour

1 teaspoon each of salt, pepper, and dried thyme

5 eggs

a cup or two of breadcrumbs or panko

A piece of plastic wrap or wax paper or parchment paper or something like that

A decent frying pan such as a cast iron skillet

a rolling pin or something like it

a knife

tongs, a spatula, or a very high pain tolerance (seriously just use tongs)

Since pigs use them to walk around all day, pork legs get a nice workout and thereby develop a lot of flavor. They also get very tough and need some special care in cooking so as to tenderize them. Ordinarily the rear leg is cured as ham or ground into sausage, and the front leg is turned into roasts for slow cooking or smoking, or cut into steaks which can then be slow cooked (such as in a braise) or smoked. All of these slow cooking methods tenderize the pork. Making schnitzel is a great way to speed up the cooking time while still tenderizing the meat. (It does not, however, save on cleanup time.)

Put the flour on a plate or in a bowl. Mix the salt, pepper, and dried thyme into the flour. Use any kind of grain flour you want.

Crack the eggs into a bowl and mix them.

Put the breadcrumbs on a plate or in a bowl.

Cut the pork leg steak into smaller pieces. For a one inch thick steak, cut pieces about the size of a deck of cards.

Put a piece of pork on a hard surface such as a cutting board or countertop, and place over it a piece of plastic wrap or something like it. Now take your rolling pin or equivalent whack the pork. Once the pork is pounded down to about a quarter-inch thickness you should probably stop and move on to another piece. Don’t try to save time by getting your pork steak cut a quarter-inch thick, because you still need to pound on it to tenderize it. Repeat until all the pork is pounded.

Add lard to the frying pan and apply heat. You want it hot but not insane. Lard has a high smoke point, so if it’s smoking your pan is way too hot, turn it down.

If you are perturbed by sizzling spatters of hot lard on your forearms, get someone else to do the rest of this. Or maybe wear long sleeves.

Using one hand only, and potentially your non-dominant hand, take a piece of pork and put it in the seasoned flour so both sides are covered with flour. Shake off the excess. Take said piece of pounded pork and plop it into the eggs so both sides are covered in egg. Shake off the eggcess. Now gently put it into the breadcrumbs and make sure to get both sides. Excess breadcrumbs can fall off on their own.

Now use the same hand to place the pork into the frying pan. The thimbles of caked-on flour, egg, and breadcrumb on your fingers should help to shield your soft, delicate, dainty fingers from the painfully popping melted lard. You could also use tongs, but whatever you do please do not toss the pork into the hot cooking fat from a distance causing boiling-hot cooking fat to spatter up at you. The problem with using tongs is that you risk the pork slipping out of the tongs too early and causing the hot fat to splash up at you.

Repeat until your frying pan is full, keeping an inch or so between each piece of pork in the pan.

Cook each piece for just a few minutes, then flip using tongs or a spatula with your other hand that isn’t covered in a sticky mess. There’s no point in washing your hands until you’re finished cooking all the pork, and you don’t really have time anyways as these cook quite quickly after being pounded out to a quarter-inch thickness. This is why you may want to use your non-dominant hand to do the breading. After flipping the pieces cook them another few minutes on the other side, then remove from the frying pan. The pork should be cooked through with just a few minutes of cooking on each side; check the first piece to make sure. Repeat until all the pork is cooked.

These are even better with some kind of sauce. Either a brown gravy, a fruit-based condiment such as a chutney, or a mayonnaise-based sauce (“aioli”) such as mayo-and-mustard, mayo-and-relish, or something like that.

Ham hocks and beans

2 tablespoons lard or other cooking fat

2 - 4 smoked ham hocks

a few tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 pound dry beans such as black beans

1 onion, diced

1 bunch celery, sliced

3 carrots, sliced

minced garlic (as much as you like it)

several large pinches of ground cumin

several large pinches of dry oregano

1/4 cup molasses

2 bay leaves

chicken stock (optional) or salted water

Thanks to Justina’s photography we have a picture this time!

Smoked ham hocks are a great way to add flavor to vegetable-based soups and stews, especially beans. For some people this is very much a traditional New Years meal. While it takes a long time to cook, most of that is just letting it sit on the stove on very low heat, so it’s a pretty low-effort meal for what you get, which is delicious.

Soak the beans overnight in a large pot full of water and defrost the ham hocks.

Start cooking by mid-morning or at the lastest noon in order to have this ready for dinner. Remove the beans from the pot and drain them. Heat lard or another high-heat cooking fat in the pot over medium-high heat. Add the ham hocks and sear them on all sides. Remove ham hocks.

Add diced onion and cook until translucent. Add garlic and celery and continue to cook until garlic begins to brown.

Add carrots and any other vegetables and cook for another minute or so. Most bean soup recipes call for things like green pepper. This is very much a winter-time dish, and green peppers are not in season. Parsnips could be a good addition, or replacement for the carrots. Wintertime greens like kale would fit well. Avoid starchy vegetables like winter squash, as the beans will have enough starch on their own.

Add the beans to the pot. Add chicken stock or water and a pinch or so of salt. Add enough liquid to cover the beans and no more. Add the vinegar. Add the cumin and oregano. If you feel the need to measure, something like a teaspoon or two of each. Add the molasses. Add the bay leaves. Stir everything, then add the ham hocks so they are covered as much as possible by the liquid.

Bring the soup to a boil and then turn down to a very low simmer and…wait. Stir the beans and flip the ham hocks every couple hours. It will likely take several hours for the beans to be tender, and you are also looking to reduce and thicken the broth.

Of course this recipe would work just fine in a crock pot or slow cooker.

When the meat starts pulling off the ham hocks, remove them from the pot. Pull the meat and fat off the bones, discard the bones, and shred the meat and fat with two forks, then return it to the pot of beans and stir. Continue to cook on a low simmer. You can basically keep simmering until you want to eat; the beans will eventually get mushy, but this doesn’t make them taste bad and will only happen after a long time. Everything will just get better the longer it cooks together, and the broth will be better the more it reduces. As the beans break down and release starch into the cooking liquid it becomes creamy and delicious.

A crusty sourdough or rye bread would be good to serve with the soup, to soak up the very flavorful and nutritious cooking liquid.

What to make from half a hog (one example)

If you’re ordering a half hog from us or from another local family farmer and getting your meat custom cut by a local butcher, you may be wondering what to have the butcher make with all that pork. Here is one example. You could probably copy this and send it to the butcher if you like.

This is relatively simple; you could, of course, be a lot more creative in what you get, and you could keep a lot more of the fat and offal if you want to cook more of it. The amount of extra fat here will make perhaps around 6 pints of rendered lard; by all means keep more for rendering if you want more.

This example has a lot of cured bacon and ham but you will not get as much sausage. You’ll still get a few pounds of sausage though, from the trimmings, so you’ll need to decide what kind of sausage you want. Bulk (loose) breakfast or Italian sausage both tend to be pretty versatile in the kitchen; if you want something like bratwurst they’ll be delicious but butchers normally charge extra as putting sausage in casings is extra work. Worth it if you don’t mind the extra cost! If you want more sausage, two decent options are to grind the ham leg or grind the picnic shoulder. For some other ideas see this post.

Packaging: butcher paper works great. Some butchers will offer vacuum-sealed plastic for an extra cost. This makes it easier to see what you’re pulling out of the freezer, and it’s possible the vacuum seal will prevent freezer burn longer. Throwing a pork barbecue extravaganza for your friends seems like more fun though. Both paper and plastic are good options for freezer storage, so it depends on your preference.

Here is the custom cut example:

SHOULDER

Picnic shoulder roast, bone-in, trim as needed but keep it on the larger size around 6+ pounds if possible, for smoking.

Make a little shoulder bacon, 1 pound packages. Cut the rest of the Boston Butt into a smaller boneless roast or roasts, in the 3 pound range.

LOIN

Pull off the tenderloin and keep it whole. Take out the baby-back ribs as well and keep as a whole rack.

Make double-thickness boneless pork chops, 2 per package. Keep a good 3/4 inch or so of fat on the the chops.

Add the pork sirloin to the sausage grind.

BELLY

Spare ribs yes, whole rack.

Standard bacon, 1 pound packages.

HAM

Cure the ham and take some center-cut bone-in ham steaks, 3/4 inch thick, one per package.

Keep the butt and shank parts of the ham whole, so these are two smaller hams in the 3-pound range in addition to the center-cut ham steaks.

OTHER

Smoke the hocks.

Make some jowl bacon, 1 pound packages.

Package about 10 pounds of back fat and about 5 pounds of leaf lard.

Package any extra bones for soup stock. Yes to neck bones if available.

Split the feet for stock.

Package a couple pounds of pork skin, enough to make a batch of pork rinds but not go crazy.

Heart and liver, yes (if available). No to the rest of the offal.

Liver Dumpling Soup

“Liver dumplings?” you say. “Really?”

Unless you’re saying, “Leberknoedel! Sehr gut!”

But yes, really. These dumplings are three-year-old approved.

With a food processor this recipe is quite simple to make, and is a great way to make a meal with our healthy, pasture-raised pork liver. This is for when you want a mild, “hm, yes, I can taste the liver in this” and not the strong, “Wow! That’s a lot of liver flavor!” that you would get from something like a “paatay”. (Our website software apparently doesn’t know how to print an e with an accent.)

You will need

A large cooking pot, a couple large bowls, a knife, and a food processor.

Liver (Get GOOD liver. Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig! You could use calves liver or beef liver as well.)

Bacon (Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig!)

A couple eggs (Ditto, except from a chicken. Pigs don’t lay eggs. That would make breakfast too easy.)

Plain wheat bread (could be white, whole wheat, or sourdough)

Milk or cream

Bread crumbs or just some old extra bread

Fresh parsley or possibly some other fresh herb you like

Marjoram (dried or fresh)

Onion

Salt and pepper

Seasoned beef broth. (You could of course use pork broth, but in fact using beef broth provides a nice flavor contrast, and while the liver flavor really isn’t that strong, chicken broth probably isn’t going to be enough to stand up to it.)

Here’s what to do

Take about as much bread as you have liver (by size, not weight) and cut or tear it up into pieces. Soak these in milk or cream. Use your hands and squish the bread and milk to ensure the bread is soaked. Use enough milk or cream that the bread gets very full of milk, but not so much that the bread can’t soak it all up. Do this first so you can set it aside and let the milk soak into the bread while you prepare everything else.

If you get liver from us it ought to be pretty well cleaned already. Cut it up into pieces about 2 inches in size. You may find some tough parts, cut those out and give those to the dog.

Cut the bacon into about 2-inch pieces. Use enough bacon that you’ll be able to taste it, but you don’t need a 1:1 ratio. These are liver dumplings with some bacon added for the flavor, not bacon-and-liver dumplings. This would be a great way to use those “bacon ends and pieces” you got a good deal on.

Put the liver pieces and bacon pieces in your food processor and make pink paste.

Finely dice an onion and chop some parsley. Again, you want enough onion and parsley that you can taste them, but you don’t want so much that these turn into onion dumplings.

Like this!

In a large bowl, using your hands, mix the milk-soaked bread, liver-and-bacon paste, onion, parsley, marjoram (a pinch or a couple teaspoons, depending on whether your liver is measured in ounces or pounds), salt and pepper, and two eggs. The mixture will be very wet. Add bread crumbs or crumbled old bread until the mixture sticks together. You should be able to pick up a spoonful and turn the spoon over without it falling off.

None of this takes very long, but you could do this part in advance and just store the mixture in the fridge until you’re ready to cook.

Cooking takes about 30 minutes

In a large pot bring the broth to a boil. After you begin adding the dumplings, turn down the heat. The dumplings should be simmered, not boiled. (The cold dumplings will cool down the broth. That’s why you want to bring the broth up to a boil first and then turn down the heat to cook. If you add the dumplings first and then try to heat it up, it will take you until forget-it-we’ll-just-have-pizza time to get the whole thing up to temperature.)

Here’s what they look like while cooking

Using a soup spoon or other large table-spoon-ish-sized instrument, make “quenelles” of the dumpling mixture. (“Quenelle” is apparently a fancy French word for “a spoonful”. We don’t know. All the French people we know talk like normal people.) Slide them off the spoon into the simmering broth. You might need to use another spoon (or your finger) to help get the sticky dumpling mixture off the spoon. You can fill the pot with dumplings, just make sure that the dumplings are in the broth and not piled on top of it. After they cook for a bit they will float to the top; that’s fine.

Let the dumplings simmer in the broth for 25 minutes. As long as it is simmering and not boiling, you can cook them longer if you’re not ready to eat yet. We kept them on for 50 minutes and second helpings tasted as good as the first. If you are going to cook them longer, put a lid on the pot so your broth doesn’t evaporate away.

Serve the dumplings in the broth and with some more rough-chopped parsley. This isn’t a low-carb meal given all the bread and bread crumbs in it, so some nice crusty bread is a nice addition to help soak up the broth.

If the soup smells strongly of liver, do not despair! (We’re not saying it smells “bad”, just strong.) In fact it will likely taste relatively mild. It seems something about the liver flavor compounds aerosolizes quite well, but the smell isn’t an indication of the taste.

Seriously this is really good. Bitte!

Our family half hog cut list for August 2019

Leg

Smoke the hocks

Grind the leg for sausage (no ham, as we made a lot of ham from a different pig and still have plenty)

Sausage: equal amounts of No-Sugar Breakfast Sausage, Sweet Italian Sausage, and Bratwurst

Belly

Side bacon

Spare ribs

Shoulder

Cottage bacon (made from the Boston butt part of the shoulder)

Shoulder steaks (1/2 inch) made from the picnic shoulder

Loin

Bone in double-thickness (1 1/4 inch) pork chops (rib, center, and sirloin)

Other

Jowl bacon

Soup bones, Fat, Skin, Offal, Tail, Feet

Pork heart pappardelle ragu

Simply offal

Offal Simple

This is an excellent, earthy dish. It’s not like eating liver or kidney, everyone is going to like this. This would be a great dish to start on if you’ve never eaten organ meat before. You can make this entire dish in under an hour if you really want to.

The flavor of pork heart, mushrooms, and browned butter complement each other perfectly.

Have no fear, heart is very clean and easy to work with.

Prep the Heart

A pig heart looks like, well, a heart. It is made up of extremely lean muscle cupping four empty chambers. The first thing to do is cut through each of these chambers so that you can lay the heart muscle out flat, as seen in the photo to the side.

In the photo you can see the heart muscle laid out reasonably flat. There will be a thin, translucent membrane covering it. You probably don’t need to worry because you’ll be pulverizing this in the food processor, but you may as well cut this membrane off because you’re going to have plenty of meat as it is. Don’t worry about saving the meat attached to the membrane, just slice it off with a big knife. You can cook this up later (it cooks very fast) and feed it to a pet dog or cat.

You will also find some very thin tubes sometimes in the sides of the heart chambers. Cut those out as well or just pull them off with your fingers. They come away easily. Again, it probably doesn’t matter so you can skip this step if you want.

Just a rough chop to fit into the food processor

Finely chopped in a food processor

Probably because it lacks any connective tissue found in most other cuts of meat, the heart muscle is quite easy to work with and cut through. All you need to do is chop it roughly into large pieces that you can fit into your food processor. Then pulverize it. It should be ground very fine but not into a paste.

Prep the Veg

Clean and rough chop or slice some flavorful mushrooms. You want something like shiitakes or chanterelles, preferably not the standard button mushroom creminis.

Also clean and thinly slice the white parts of two leeks. An easy way to clean leeks is to cut off the roots at the bottom and most of the green tops, and then slice the white part in half lengthwise. Holding it together by wrapping your hand around all the layers, swish each half around in a pot of clean water. This will work water into all of the layers and wash out any grit that has been caught in there. Then you can slice crossways.

Chop some fresh rosemary. The leaves of a few stalks should be enough. Don’t overdo it.

Brown in Butter

Add a half stick or so of butter to a skillet pan or stew pot, something with reasonably high sides and plenty of room on the bottom. Melt and cook the butter at reasonably high heat. Your goal is to just begin to brown the butter, but not to burn it. A heavier pot helps with this as it will even out the distribution of heat in the cooking vessel. We use enamel-coated cast iron, which is expensive but absolutely worth what you pay for it. You know your butter is beginning to brown when it is melted and starts making the whole kitchen smell really, really good, like butter.

After the butter is melted and beginning to brown, add the ground pork heart. At medium-high heat this will cook quickly. Stir often.

When the ground pork heart is cooked, which will happen quickly, add more butter and then add the mushrooms. Keep the meat and mushrooms moving around in the browned butter on medium-high heat, almost as if you were stir-frying. You don’t need to stir constantly, but stay alert. You don’t want anything sticking on the bottom of the pan and burning. If the mushrooms soak up all the butter, add another half stick or so. You can also turn the heat down slightly if you need to do so.

Yes, it smells amazing

Cook the mushrooms until they begin to soften. Don’t try to saute and brown them. You want them cooked through and soft but not mushy and not sauted or fried. They should taste like fresh mushrooms that have been warmed and softened, not like fully-cooked.

Deglaze With Stock

Now add in pork or chicken stock to deglaze the pan. You need a cup or 2 at most of stock, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan to deglaze it. Lightly scrape the bottom of the pan with your spatula as you continue to keep the pork heart and mushrooms stirred.

If your butter is salted and/or your stock has salt, you probably do not need to add extra salt. Season to taste with salt and a little ground black pepper.

Add the leeks and fresh rosemary, stir again, turn down the heat to low and cover. Let sit on low heat until the leeks are tender. This is another reason why you don’t need to overcook the mushrooms before you add in the stock, since everything will continue to cook. By the time the leeks are tender, the stock will have been absorbed or cooked off. Chop a stick of butter into chunks and add it, stirring until the butter is melted.

Pop in the Pappardelle

To the final dish add fresh-cooked pappardelle pasta and mix well. The large, flat, egg noodles of pappardelle work best, but you could use farfalle or some other pasta with a large surface area. Don’t use something with a small surface area like spaghetti, or the sauce will just fall off.

This is a lightly sauced dish; you should add enough pasta to feed 8 people, more or less. You don’t want the pasta drowned in sauce, rather, each piece of pasta should just have flecks here and there of the ground pork heart, with a slice of mushroom in every few bites. A neat trick is to use a pasta server or slotted spoon to scoop pasta directly from the pasta water into the sauce pot. Don’t worry about draining off the water that is on the pieces of pasta. The small amount of starchy pasta water will help the sauce stick to the noodles.

Ask yourself why you wouldn’t add another stick or so of butter. Remember, the heart has zero fat on it. Mix again.

Serve with fresh-grated parmesan.

This is not a dish that is interesting to try. It is not a fun and inventive way to use up pig heart. Your kids are going to love this, and when it is gone you will start wondering where you can find another pig heart so you can make this again.