What? How? Who?

[mme_hardy]

Deep-frying foods in vegetable oil seems like a modern American craze, but it was an ancient cooking tradition in West Africa, and one that we have inherited from enslaved people.

Akara sounds pretty tasty, but that's a bizarre sentence up there.

Comments

[malkingrey]

Lord knows, cooks in medieval times were deep-frying fritters made of all sorts of stuff.

[mme_hardy]

Good point. What were they using as fat? Clarified butter? Suet?

[malkingrey]

Lard, probably. Or olive oil, if they were in the Mediterranean. Or goose, duck, or chicken fat.

As far as I could ever tell, most pre-modern recipes for fried things tend to more or less assume the locally-used cooking fat. It's only these days, really, that we've got access to the whole global array.

[legionseagle]

I'm sorry to say that when we took big style in the UK to fish and chips (which was an idea we nicked from the Jewish community of the East End) what they were using oop North was often neats-foot oil, which you got as a side-product of tripe dressing.

And Heaven and Nature Sing

[executrix]

Seasonally appropriate: Joy to the World! The Lard is come!

Re: And Heaven and Nature Sing

[legionseagle]

That'll do nicely for basting the tender lamb, now it's appeared at last.