Dripping and lard – old-fashioned fat is back
As cooking oil prices rise, British shoppers are turning to the traditional fats Granny once used, says Eleanor Steafel
If I poked around in your fridge, how likely is it that I’d find a bowl of dripping? What about a block of lard? A small Tupperware of chicken schmaltz? Any chance of a pat of Trex vegetable fat? No? I’ll hazard a guess that I might find a bottle of extra virgin olive oil by the hob, though, and perhaps a couple of litres of sunflower, vegetable or rapeseed in the store cupboard.
It used to be that fat was a luxury. The trim on a marbled cut of beef or the thick ivory blanket on a pork belly would always have been rendered, cooled, jarred and used again. Bacon grease would have stayed in the pan for days after a butty, used to fry eggs, leftover veg, slightly stale bread. And a cheap block of lard or vegetable shortening would have been a mainstay in most fridges, a little going a long way – because it had to, but also because, with a bit of thought and care, it could.
Now, we plonk a bottle of oil in the trolley without paying much attention to the price. It’s considered an essential item; one that three out of four British households buy, use most days, and replenish every eight to 10 weeks. In the UK, we spend almost £400m a year on cooking oil. Well, until now.
In the past month, Waitrose has seen searches for lard soar by 40 per cent, as we look for “more traditional cooking methods” to get around the oil crisis. Lard has seen the biggest spike, but sales of other animal fats like goose and duck have gone up, too. Searches for beef dripping (which you can buy in a 250g block for 80p or a 200g jar for £1.30) have risen by 17 per cent; salted butter and ghee are proving popular; and sales of cooking and baking fats are up nine per cent compared to just last month.
So fish out your old Good Housekeeping manuals, or maybe invest in a Mrs Beeton reprint – it’s time to get to grips with dripping.
The costs of everyday items are now soaring at such a pace that retail analysts have coined the term “shelf shock”. And in no corner of the supermarket are those shockwaves being felt more keenly than the cooking oil aisle. Vegetable and sunflower were already on the rise before the Ukrainian war (80 per cent of the world’s sunflower oil comes from the country and its attacker, Russia) but prices have kept climbing since March. Chefs report that they are paying three times more for cooking oil than they were six months ago (one tells me it’s “dearer than unleaded”, with sunflower oil now over £50 for 20 litres, up from around £17 in August) as their wholesalers are hit by crumbling supply chains.
For the average home cook, the answer had been stockpiling before some supermarkets began capping the number of bottles you could purchase in one go. Cooking oil sales had risen by 17 per cent in the year from April 2021, according to market analyst Kantar, with sunflower oil – which most Brits use for frying – up 27 per cent in April, and vegetable oil up 40 per cent.
For some, though, the cooking oil crisis has ushered in a return to old-fashioned methods and those thrifty refrigerated fats we always used to rely on. It’s often the way in leaner times. No matter how innovative our food has become or how much kit now takes up space on our kitchen counters, tradition tends to win out when we need to make do with less.
Not that any of this is news to people of my grandparents’ generation, who would never have dreamt of discarding the fat from a Sunday roast, and would always have had a pat of lard or bowl of dripping in the fridge rather than relying on processed oils. My Irish Catholic grandmother kept the fat from her beef in a small cream ceramic bowl in the Electrolux. She’d use this dripping – so much more flavourful than vegetable oil – for roast potatoes and chips (whatever was left of it, anyway, once my grandfather had syphoned some off for his dripping on toast), and had a block of Trex or lard on rotation for Yorkshire puddings and pancakes.
My Jewish grandmother was a rather more haphazard cook (she famously once left a cherry-red false nail in the fruit salad she’d made for a dinner party, only realising when my grandfather announced to the entire room “Marian, I’ve found your nail”) and was oddly partial to a low-cal spray. But I’m told her German mother was religious about saving the schmaltz from a Friday night chicken, using it to sauté the onions for her chopped liver or spreading it on slices of challah, “like Jewish bread ’n’ dripping”.
For a while, of course, fat was deemed to be the devil’s work – packed with cholesterol and far less healthy than refined vegetable oils. It seems to have had a rebrand – and right on time. These days, a bit of quality animal fat or butter (with its “good” saturated fats as opposed to evil trans fats) is generally considered more acceptable than an ultra processed oil.
Perhaps inevitably, it’s also considered “foodie”. Fat washed cocktails are all the rage, and no small plates menu is complete without something deep fried or a few delicate shavings of lardo (fatty pork rind, which oddly sounds more appealing
No longer seen as the devil’s work, lard seems to have had a rebrand –and right on time
than lard) or smear of aged beef dripping on toast. Ocado sells little jars of Iberico pork fat for £3.15, and you can order natural pork lard direct from some farms (try coombefarmorganic.co.uk if you fancy getting in some seriously upmarket fat).
For chefs, the cooking oil crisis means that deep frying is out. Ellis Barrie, chef-owner of destination restaurant Lerpewl in Liverpool, says that he’s taking his deep fried bar snacks off the menu as the price of sunflower oil has tripled: “We’re going to get rid of our fried products so we’re not using the fryer at all. We’re literally just going to start finding textures from alternative sources.”
He may look into using a refined British rapeseed oil, but fears it could be just as pricey. Olive oil is out as it burns too fast so can’t be used for frying at very high temperatures. Like most high-end restaurants, they use as much of an animal as possible, rendering off fats and reusing. But unless your menu is entirely meatbased, Barrie adds, swapping oil for lard isn’t really “a viable alternative”.
At home, though, it may well be the answer. Meat might be expensive (chicken is almost dearer than beef at the moment) but if you can get a tub of cooking fat from it and perhaps a pan of stock, then it starts to feel like better value. Paul Foster, chef-owner of Michelin-starred Salt, in Stratford upon Avon, recommends using the fat already on a piece of meat to cook it in.
“It’s about thinking: do you need [the oil]?” says Foster, who used to pay £11 for five litres – last week, he spent £42.
“If you are cooking lamb chops, for instance, you don’t need to put any oil in the pan, you can cook the fat side first and then turn it onto the meat side and use its own fat to cook it in. It’s easy to just add a few tablespoons of oil, but you don’t need to.”
Time to eschew the bottle of oil and start collecting your leftover fats, then. Turns out, Granny was right all along.