Cracklins

You can't live in the South and not be a big fan of Cracklins.  Cracklins is fried pig skin, sometimes also called pork rind.   Some entrepreneurs have made cracklins out of chicken skin, too, but they aren't the real McCoy, as they say.

The original reason cracklins were born is because after the pig was butchered, they also wanted to get the lard, which is always right under the skin.  So they boiled it.  And a byproduct of that boiling was fried skins. Once they were cooked, they didn’t need to be refrigerated, so they became a real popular item in the days before refrigeration.  And if you go into any convenience store along the way, cracklins in a wide variety of styles take up a lot of shelf space.

 Here's how they look.                                                         And how they are packaged. 

 In case you care about the color you can get them dyed.

 One of the best sites for describing how to make cracklins is here:

www.deltablues.net/cracklin.html

To quote from this website,    "Man, they say, 'those cracklins fresh out of the grease were some fine eatin'.”

The lard is used for a lot of things.  Southerners claim that even though it has lots of cholesterol, it only contains about 1/3 of the cholesterol as  butter.  It is also used for putting in biscuits and cornbread.  Used it to cook almost everything, like Crisco.  And also used for grease for wagon wheels and muzzle loading firearms. 

We passed a place in Vidalia, just before Natchez that had a store selling just Cracklins and Watermelons.  I doubt they had the watermelons this time of year, but I bet they had lots of Cracklins!