Pork rinds, which I grew up associating with gas station vending machines and rather ark rundown taverns, now seem to be available at every grocery store and convenience store I go into. Last week, looking over all the different flavors and wondering once again what the difference is between these and the cracklings my mother used to tell me about, I decided to do some research. (Even though, as mentioned hithertofore, I do NOT write a food blog.)
I grew up in hog country, which seems to surprise no one who takes a long look at me. Knowing that, one would think I would be conversant with the niceties of pickled pork, pork rinds, and other downhome delicacies.
The thing is that neither of my parents grew up in hog country, and Dad particularly felt pork was best served in the form of chops, roasts, bacon, and ham, which were neutral shapes and did not suggest the original animal at all. Come to think of it, my father also preferred white meat when eating chicken, which also did not suggest an animal as, say, the wings or drumsticks do. Have I stumbled upon another sociological distinction between different types of people, which, properly considered, might go beyond the bounds of cuisine into interpersonal and even international relations, explaining why countries go to war and divide along certain…where were we?
Mom regarded food differently, as a result of how her parents made it through World War II. (Dad’s parents seem to have made do with peanut butter when meat was short.) She it was who introduced me to pork hocks (largely unobtainable where I live, as I now reside in Ham Hock territory.) She spoke highly of lard sandwiches, and knew where to find those bargain boxes of bacon which did not fit in tidy rows in the packages displayed front and center: odds and ends of bizarre shapes and sizes. But one dish she remembered best was crackings, or, as people prefer to spell it, cracklin’s. Both of these are bits of pig which, like the bacon scraps, did not fit into the more stately dishes.
But though they are related, they are not at all the same thing, the Interwebs informs me. Cracklings are what’s left when pork fat is cooked down to produce lard (the best lard for sandwiches, I was told, is not the refined lard found today but still had some scraps of meat in it.) Cracklings are what’s left when the lard has been cooked away, and most closely resemble, it seems, the crust formed on the fatty side of a pork roast. A pork rind is a strip of pigskin unsuitable for footballs which has had the fat cooked away from it, and is then dried, rehydrated, and fried anew until it puffs up to about five times its original size. The flavor is bland without added seasoning, and the texture has been compared to that of a cheese puff with attitude.
Different sources differentiate between the home made pork rind and the industrial one of modern manufacture (cracklings seem to have eluded an efficient mass production process) and Southern Living magazine tosses in “fatback”, called “lardons” in fancier dining establishments, for good measure. Pursuing this led me down a rabbit’s hole to a hog wallow, as people discussed the merits of pickled pig’s feet, pickled pork hocks, deep fried pig tails, and pig’s ears, which are less often used in recipes for human consumption than used a dog treats. I have not tried these last few delicacies—I find I am squeamish about foods which look TOO much as if they came from an animal–but I will speak out for pig’s ears on the table instead of under it. Apparently there is an epidemic in this country of pigs losing their ears to passing dogs who recognize a treat. Um, why, yes, I guess that does mean I’m saying you should serve the ears to me instead of to Rover, but, er…as I was saying, I want a percentage from any of those of you who get the Nobel Prize for your work finding out whether people who like their meat in nice clean slices and people who don’t mind grabbing a wing or an ear are natural opponents, or whether they just accidentally always marry each other.
Blogsy Babbles 