I want to preface this post with the disclaimer that I don’t eat like this all the time. Currently my favorite snacks are, in no particular order: candy crisp apples, toasted mochi sweetened with honey, roasted beets dressed in vinegar, and kale chips. So it’s not as if I’m having lard biscuits for breakfast, lard pies for dessert, and lard snacks in between. Because I really only do that once or twice a week, and even then, I share. Sharing is key.

But sometimes, lard just begs to be made into a snack. Once all that beautiful, ambrosial liquid fat has been rendered from leaf lard, you’re left with several hefty handfuls of cracklings: little indigestible bits – crunchy, porky and irresistible. Dressed in your choice of seasonings, cracklings are wonderful as snacks or mashed up and spread on toast. In the fall or winter when I’m more likely to have roasted or confited garlic on hand, I mix the cracklings with the garlic for a classic Southwestern French treat. The softened, sweet garlic blends easily with the crispy bits of fat.
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When you’re looking to bake a batch of cookies for friends who are butchers, it is generally advisable that the cookies be a) made from lard and b) fashioned like pigs. It is, in my opinion the gift for the butcher who has everything.

When I first bought this cookie cutter, I tried cutting everything into the shape of a pig: biscuits, blocks of cotton tofu, premade squares of mochi – you name it, I tried to piggify it. Really, though, a cookie cutter shaped like a pig is good for one thing only: cookies. The nooks and crannies in the cutter can only keep their shape if the material is thin and relatively solid, like that of a rolled out cookie dough.
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