Schmaltz

Schmaltz is rendered, clarified chicken or goose fat, made by cutting fatty tissue into small pieces, melting it with dry or wet heat, then filtering and clarifying the result, and used as a cooking fat, spread or flavoring. It has been an integral part of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine for centuries, appearing in chicken soup, latkes, matzah brei, chopped liver and matzah balls, and became the practical cooking fat for kosher kitchens in central and eastern Europe because Jewish dietary law barred both butter, on account of meat-dairy separation, and lard, as a pork product, while olive oil was not readily available in that climate. Its popularity declined during the twentieth century amid the inconvenience of rendering it, health concerns about saturated fat, and aggressive marketing of vegetable shortening such as Crisco, but chefs including Anthony Bourdain and Michael Solomonov have revived interest in it since the start of the twenty-first century.