As we had no money to buy fat with when I was a girl, we made our own by rendering it when we killed an animal. We cut off the fat, cleaned it up, and then cut it up finely with a knife. Then we put it in our big pots and cooked it until all that remained was the cracklings floating in the boiling fat. We drained off as much fat as we could, poured it into pails, and stored it in the root cellar. We used this to make pies, and to cook with. We put the cracklings away for another day when we would make soap out of them. The cracklings still had a lot of fat in them. …
