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intestines) were
eaten immediately. (Another favorite post-boucherie supper was brains and
onions along the Cote des Allemands of Louisiana.) Globs of hog fat were
boiled in a gigantic black pot to be rendered into lard. Scraps of meat were
ground up for sausages. Ribs were slowly steamed (as in the method recommended by Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who oversaw the pork
preparation for his boys in gray). Sides of bacon, hog jowls, shoulders, and
hams were cured in salt for weeks. Then they were hung in the smokehouse
along with a variety of sausages, ham hocks, and knuckles to be smoked over
hickory or pecan wood, peanut shells, or corncobs (known as meat cobs).
Some farmers cured their meat with red pepper to prevent infestations of fly
larvae in the era before refrigeration.

    While the gourmands in history may debate the merits of butter over olive
oil, most cooks who stooped over Southern hearths employed a cheaper, more
accessible, all-purpose fat. The Spanish had long elevated lard (41 percent saturated fat) to a fat as cherished as olive oil. When I encountered Carl A.
Brasseaux's statement that "butter was practically unknown to the Acadians"
in his book, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in
Louisiana, X765-1803, I initially was skeptical. How could these seventeenthcentury refugees of butter-eating Brittany and Normandy not have butter, especially when they kept cows in Nova Scotia and Louisiana? The answer seems
to be simply that Acadians preferred the taste of pork.
    Lard is so vital, in fact, that not one of the people of Acadian ancestry I interviewed could ever even remember eating butter prior to World War II. Even
those who had ice boxes didn't eat much butter. "What would we use butter
for?" reasoned a friend's Cajun, French-speaking great-grandmother from
Villa Platte. "We cooked with bacon fat and lard. We put my fine fig preserves
or cane syrup on our bread!"
    "Butter was rare in our house," says Frances Aubert Hebert Richard, daughter of a turn-of-the-century rice farmer in Meaux, Louisiana. "Even though
we had cows, I think churning butter was just too time consuming. Especially
when we didn't have a cool place to keep sweet butter fresh."
    "The only thing we used the milk from our Jersey cow for was to make cail-
lie egoute, a type of cream cheese we ate with sugar," says Willie Schutz, past
president of the Acadiana Herb Society and a fifth-generation native of New
Iberia. "Butter was not predominant in our home, though." Her mother, Anna
Mae Darce (b. 1923), grew up on Pebbles Plantation between New Iberia and
Loreauville during the depression. Mother and daughter both follow an old
family tradition and cook with only one cooking oil-hog lard. "When a hog
was butchered in the cold months, the meat was stored in gallon syrup cans,"
recalls Schutz. "The lard was rendered to be used for piecrust and to saute
with."
    Dr. Gabou Mendy is a Louisiana physician who was born and raised in
Gambia in West Africa says, "The reason why foods made with rice, chicken,
black-eyed peas and okra taste so different in Africa than they do in Louisiana
is the fats which they are prepared with. In West Africa we traditionally cook
with palm oil because it is the most available." Palm oil (51 percent saturated
fat) is by all accounts the very soul of fat in the diets of many postcolonial cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.
    Palm oil, unlike okra, rice, and West African one-pot cooking techniques,
did not, however, leave its mark on Southern cuisine. To discover what our gumbos and jambalaya could have tasted like had palm oil been consumed in
Louisiana, we must travel to Brazil, where it remains a sensory cornerstone.
Gastro-ethnographically speaking, we know that palm oil came to the New
World with the West African slaves transported by the Portuguese to Brazil,
where the palms they transplanted took root to create a cuisine similar in
taste,