The Right Chemistry: The search for an alternative to lard

“Noah was the founder of indigestion — he forgot to leave the pigs ashore.” That rather ingenious premise, blazing in large letters atop a newspaper ad in the late 1800s, was sure to catch the consumer’s eye. The reader would then learn that “lard-soaked food is not fit for human stomachs because lard is made from greasy, indigestible hog fat, and is bound, sooner or later, to make trouble for your inner machinery.” The advertisement was for Cottolene, the first mass-produced and mass-marketed alternative to lard.

Why would an alternative to lard have consumer appeal? The health food movement was beginning to emerge in the United States with faddists such as Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg claiming that indigestion, or “dyspepsia,” was a national curse caused by eating meat and refined grains. The cure was a diet of vegetables and whole grains. Lard, the main shortening and cooking fat at the time, was often viciously attacked because of its animal origins, a fact noted by Nathaniel Kellogg Fairbanks, who knew all about fats because his Chicago company manufactured soap from fat obtained from slaughter houses.

Fairbanks now saw an opportunity to produce an alternative to lard from a non-animal source. However, the plant-derived fats available at the time, olive oil and cottonseed oil, were liquids. Could they be converted into solids? Olive oil was way too expensive to consider, but cottonseed oil, produced from the seeds of the cotton boll, was plentiful due to the large cotton industry in the southern United States. It was mainly used in lamps, being a cheaper alternative to whale oil or lard, but sometimes it was also secretly used to extend lard, an illegal activity that was uncovered when a U.S. meatpacking firm, Armour and Co., realized it had purchased more lard than could have been produced by the existing hog population.

By the late 1800s, the addition of cottonseed oil to lard was legalized as long as the product was sold as “lard compound.” This was an adequate cheap substitute for lard, but it still had the stigma of lard. What if the cottonseed oil were mixed instead with beef fat, Fairbanks wondered. After all, the Chicago slaughterhouses produced plenty of this waste product and cotton seed oil could also be purchased cheaply. Fairbanks chemist James Boyce found that just 10 per cent beef suet added to cottonseed oil resulted in a solid product that resembled lard both in appearance and function.

The ads quickly began to roll out. “The moment you put lard cooked food in your stomach you are sending out a pressing invitation for dyspepsia to call upon you.” “Cottolene shortens your food — lengthens your life.” That was at least half correct. Cottolene did act as a shortening. A “short” dough, like a pie crust, is crumbly and flakey, while pizza dough is stretchy and is said to be “long.” The texture depends on the strength of a matrix created when molecules of gluten, a type of protein in flour, are linked together as the dough is kneaded with water. Fat molecules interfere with the formation of the gluten matrix and result in shorter strands of gluten that in turn leads to a flakier texture. While Cottolene did shorten food, the claim about lengthening life had no basis.

Cottolene’s own life was shortened when a competitor entered the market in 1911. That was Procter and Gamble’s Crisco, which hyped the fact that it contained no animal products at all. The name derived from “crystallized cottonseed oil,” with “crystallized” being a clever substitute for “hardened.” Crisco relied on French chemist Paul Sabatier’s discovery that compounds of carbon could be made to react with hydrogen under the influence of a metal catalyst, a finding for which he received the 1912 Nobel prize in chemistry. German chemist Wilhelm Normann applied this discovery to liquid oils and produced the first solid “hydrogenated fats.”

In 1909, Procter and Gamble acquired the rights to Normann’s patent and “saturated” cottonseed oil with hydrogen, converting it into a hard fat that was then advertised as a vegetable alternative to lard, a curious claim since cotton isn’t a vegetable. But the main thrust of the advertising was that Crisco was “more digestible than lard,” catering to the American obsession about digestive systems being destroyed by lard. One ad proclaimed that Crisco-fried foods are so digestible you can eat them seven days a week. Another declared that “9 out of 10 doctors say it’s digestible.” Of course it is. All fats are digestible. I don’t know about that 10th doctor, but I would stay away from him.

The absence of lard was particularly important for observant Jews who avoid pork and do not mix meat and dairy at the same meal. Since Crisco was neither meat nor dairy, it was “pareve,” meaning it could be consumed with milk or meat. In a recipe book published by Crisco more than 100 years ago, Rabbi Moses S. Margolies of New York was quoted as saying that “the Hebrew Race had been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco.” Hmmm. I thought it was the Messiah we were waiting for.

The popularity of Crisco took a dive in the 1990s with the discovery that partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils resulted in a side product, the notorious “trans fats” that were linked with an increased risk of heart disease. This led to reformulation using a mix of soybean oil and fully hydrogenated palm oil with an almost total elimination of trans fats. Still not quite “motherhood and apple pie” in the eyes of people devoted to “clean eating,” but it does makes for a great pie crust.

joe.schwarcz@mcgill.ca

Joe Schwarcz is director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society (mcgill.ca/oss). He hosts The Dr. Joe Show on CJAD Radio 800 AM every Sunday from 3 to 4 p.m.

1. The Right Chemistry: Madder root, Turkey red oil and synthetic detergents

2. The Right Chemistry: Reflections on the manufacture of mirrors

3. The Right Chemistry: The history of Tylenol