Deep-Fried Excellence: Bring Back Lard!

We'd thought lard would encase and entomb food—maybe because at room temperature it looks like face cream—but it is a fat of rare finesse. ..Corn and soybean oils (these days, most bottles marked "vegetable oil" contain soy) perform well at the higher temperatures used for frying, but they also leave an unpleasant tacky residue in the mouth, like wet paint. Not lard. At 350 degrees it forms a crust that shatters with satisfying ease; my disastrous french fries came out like potato sticks, but they were potato sticks that met your teeth with a memorable snap. After hanging out in your mouth for a minute, though, a lard-fried crust becomes soft and creamy, as voluptuous as a Rubens nude but not as heavy. All my kitchen slipups didn't stop me from recognizing that lard is the most elegant fat I've ever met. Even the absence of pork flavor, which at first struck me as a flaw, only made lard seem more delicate and refined.