Heck no. I may render my own lard, but when it comes to making masa, I leave that to others. Back home in Chicago I was spoiled. I lived among hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, which meant fresh-made masa was readily available in grocery stores (the ones that catered to the Mexican population, anyway). Louisville doesn’t have nearly enough Mexicans to warrant a tortilla bakery (not yet, anyway), and that’s where fresh masa comes from. Until one of those is put up (hm…possible new business venture?) I make do with the dehydrated stuff.

Masa is a unique corn dough that’s the basis for both tamales and tortillas. More than just a simple combination of ground corn and water, it’s actually made from corn that’s been nixtamalized. That’s quite a mouthful of a word, and it refers to corn that’s been treated with a weak alkaline solution. It comes from the Aztec word “nixtamal” which, loosely translated, means “ash dough.”

Not very appetizing by the sound of it. However what ancient Mesoamericans discovered 3,500 years ago is that when you boil and then soak raw corn kernels together with ashes, some very interesting things happen. Most noticeably, the outer hulls (pericarps) of the kernels loosen to the point that they can be slipped off.

Chiles are so central to so many world cuisines, it’s easy to forget that they all originated in the New World. Szechuan chilies, Thai prik kee noo, Indian phiringi jolokia…all of them originated in Central America, more precisely the region of modern-day Ecuador, where locals have been cultivating chiles for some 6,000 years. Indeed Hungary would have no paprika whatsoever had Spanish and Portuguese traders not instigated the chile pepper diaspora in the late 1400’s. Mozambicans wouldn’t have shrimp pili pili, Moroccans no harisa, Malaysians no sambal.

Don’t worry, capsaicin addicts (especially you, reader Malini), de-seeding a chile does very little to diminish its heat. Yes, the seeds contain some of that crazy fire juice, but the vast, vast majority of it is found in the placental regions of the pepper, in other words the pale tissues that stretch along the inner walls of the pepper and connect to the base of the stem. This is where about 90% of the capsaicin in the chile is kept. Remove the seeds (which are attached to the placenta) and you do little to reduce the chile’s punch.

…and erroneous besides. Yes that’s quite true, reader Cynthia. All that really needs to be said is “chile.” It’s thought that Christopher Columbus himself was the first to start calling chiles “peppers” since he had no other frame of reference. Chiles certainly didn’t look like peppercorns to him (chiles are large berries and peppercorns are tiny drupes), but the effect they had on his taste buds was similar.

As anticipated, I received quite a few lengthy emails over the weekend from folks taking me to task for my failure to understand that it really, really was the greedy, soulless mega-corporations and their evil genius marketers that deprived our society of nutritious lard, lo these many years ago. What was particularly interesting about them is that they all pretty much used the same set of arguments (even vocabulary), which makes me think there’s some big piece out there somewhere in the MSM that they’re all getting their info from.

Lots of readers are writing in asking the same basic question: how is it that fat — and especially lard — has come to be seen as such a good thing all of a sudden? A year or so ago I was in the checkout line at my local Whole Foods. There I noticed a health magazine cover that featured a piece of bread slathered with what appeared to be…lard. The headline exclaimed something along the lines of: fat is good for you! The bullet copy proceeded to run down all the ways fat aids the metabolism. I’m not going to disagree with any of it, though like everyone I get whiplash reading health mags.

So what happened? How did fat — especially pig fat — go from anathema to all-but-health-food status? Sure you had Tom Colicchio serving his famous braised pork belly at Gramercy Tavern seven years ago. Yes Mario Batali always sang the praises of guanciale and, later, lardo. But such elite indulgences would never have captured the public imagination were tectonic shifts not already occurring in the realm of food and health.

What a weird headline, but apropos given what Reader Lee wrote yesterday:

There is something about lard that is bothering me, Joe, and I was wondering if you could help. I am beginning to detect a kind of lard snobbery in some foodie circles; you hear things like “the only lard worth using is leaf lard from the kidneys of heirloom pigs that have been raised in Alice Waters’ back yard.” The problem is that lots of us don’t have any access to fancy-schmancy pig fat, and are stuck with whatever our local Mexican butcher has on hand. For those of us using these less prestigious fats — should we still bother making our own lard? How big is the difference between what we’ll end up with, and the high-end, three-star lard that prominent food bloggers get to use every day?