From Mrs. Owens Cook Book and Useful Household Hints [1885]
Cut the leaf up, put into a kettle without water. Season slightly with salt as it melts. To clarify it, take slippery elm bark from near the roots, peel it, and use in the proportion that you would raw potato.
It will be sweeter and whiter, and keep better than with the use of potatoes. Strain through a coarse sloth. Many old housewives render the lard without clarifying at all. They salt it slightly if they want it to last through the summer.
To melt lard, take the fat from the smaller intestines, and the flabby pieces not fit for salting, strip the skin carefully from the inside fat, and cut small.
Put into a crock and set in boiling water; simmer until it melts. Strain it through a coarse cloth into small jars, and when cold, tie over them a skin that was freed from the fat, or bladders that are washed and dried.
Think about this when you open up a package of margarine!
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