Kitchenstuff is animal leftovers or unwanted parts: the fat of meat skimmed from a pot (like my bouillon), gathered out of the dripping pan and shaved off cuts of meat, skin or bones.1 In my case, kitchenstuff is parts of the animal body I am too squeamish to eat or that are obviously fatty but where collection was simply too difficult or too tedious. By custom kitchenstuff “belonged” to the household cook, to sell for her or his own benefit. Where there was no specialist cook, saving the kitchenstuff may still have been a routine part of the household oeconomy. In this respect Rein’s Oekonomische Abhandlungen marks a division between fat obtained from slaughter and kitchenstuff. The rendered tallow harvested in larger pieces first should be used to make lights, while “all unclean fat and tallow in the kitchen should be used for soap boiling, as good usable common laundry soap can be obtained from it.”2 Collect it, the author continues, from
bones that contain fat or marrow; the rinds from speck and ham; the scum of fatty meat, such as that which is skimmed to clean the broth; all the tallow left over from cooked pork; the impurities washed out of butter; the tallow from candles that have lost their wick. 3
How could I not experiment with saving the kitchenstuff of my household and turning it into viable fat? I thought this might offer another set of material experiences that could illuminate [link to candle cam?] the interplay between fat in the household and in industries.
I don’t eat much flesh and, for a great proportion of what I purchase, the fat, bones, and skin are removed.[FN: More questions about modern offal and by-products!] Nevertheless, I saved what I could for about 8 months, storing it in the freezer, to avoid the bad odor that is generally noted.
My first task was to chop (fine dice) the kitchenstuff, as I had tried to do with Pork Chop C. I let the frozen material thaw a bit and, having learned my lesson, hand-chopped it. It’s always easier to sharpen a cleaver than the blade on my Cuisinart.
Chopping semi-frozen anything is always messy, but it seemed to me I lost less material than before. Cleanup was also easier.
I placed the chopped kitchenstuff into the hotpot, added a quantity of water equivalent to its weight, and turned the setting to “keep warm.” I left it for 24 hours, strained out the liquid (with fat on top), returned what was left of the kitchenstuff to the pot, introduced more liquid and left it to heat for another 24 hours. I then strained out the unmelted bits, combined the two liquids and left the fat to solidify.
Over the next several days I separated fat from the jellied liquid, returning to the mixture intermittently to remelt and then cool all to collect as much as I could. When eyeballing the liquid suggested there might be less than a half-gram of fat remaining, I discarded the liquid.
The fat I collected was pale yellow-white, not quite the color of purchased lard but not as brown as the fat I’d collected in earlier trials. It had a faint beefy odor, although the largest part of my kitchenstuff by weight was probably poultry.
What to do with this fat, now? I used 20 g in a re-test of Chevreul’s saponification experiment in §1049. The remainder awaits another good idea.