Lard, Tallow, and the Old-Fashioned Art of Making Salves

Long before there were bottles of sweet almond oil, jars of petroleum jelly, or shelves full of specialty skin-care products, people had to work with what they had.

And for many households, what they had was animal fat.

Lard and tallow were useful, familiar ingredients that could be rendered at home and used for everything from cooking and soapmaking to candles, leather care, and skin preparations. Animal fats and oils have been used in cosmetics and topical preparations for thousands of years, and historical records show that fats were important bases for ointments, salves, and other preparations.

Today, using lard or tallow on your skin may sound unusual. We've become accustomed to reaching for plant-based carrier oils such as olive, sunflower, or sweet almond oil when making an herbal preparation.

But that wasn't always the case.

Lard and Tallow Were Useful Household Ingredients

There is an important distinction between the two.

Tallow is rendered fat, most commonly from beef or mutton. Lard is rendered pork fat.

Both can be rendered and purified at home, and both have traditionally been used as bases for topical preparations.

For a household making its own salves, the appeal was pretty straightforward: these fats were available.

If you raised livestock or had access to a local butcher, you had access to fat. Instead of throwing that fat away, you could render it and turn it into something useful.

That idea of using the whole animal was simply part of everyday life.

The fat that wasn't needed for the kitchen could become soap, candles, or a skin preparation.

It wasn't necessarily viewed as a specialty herbal ingredient.

It was simply a useful household material.

Animal Fats as Salve and Ointment Bases

Before modern cosmetic manufacturing, ointments and salves needed some sort of base to carry the other ingredients.

That might be an animal fat, plant oil, wax, or a combination of them.

Historical records show that animal fats—including lard and tallow—were used in topical preparations, sometimes with herbs, resins, sulfur, or other ingredients.

The fat itself wasn't necessarily the “medicine.”

It provided the medium that allowed other ingredients to be mixed into a preparation that could be spread onto the skin.

That's an important distinction when we look back at historical herbal preparations.

An herbal salve wasn't simply a plant mashed into fat and declared to be a cure. The fat or oil served a practical purpose: it extracted certain constituents from herbs, helped carry those constituents onto the skin, and gave the finished preparation a consistency that made it useful.

Why Were Fats So Useful?

Rendered animal fats have several characteristics that made them practical for topical preparations.

They're solid or semi-solid at room temperature, depending on the particular fat and how it has been rendered. They can be softened and combined with other ingredients, and they can be blended with beeswax to create a firmer salve.

If you're interested in working with beeswax yourself, I've shared how I prepare raw beeswax for my small-batch herbal products in [How to Prepare Raw Beeswax for Small-Batch Herbal Products].

And perhaps most importantly, they were readily available.

You didn't have to order a bottle of specialty oil from somewhere else.

You could render the fat from an animal already being raised or processed for food.

That kind of resourcefulness was simply part of running a household.

Lard in Historical Pharmacy

Lard wasn't just something used in homemade remedies.

It was also used as an ointment base in formal pharmacy.

In fact, by the early twentieth century, lard had been used widely enough in pharmaceutical ointments that its eventual replacement by petrolatum was significant. Historical pharmacy literature documents the transition from lard to petrolatum in official ointments and pastes, followed by increasing use of more stable processed fats and oils.

So the move away from lard and tallow wasn't something that happened overnight.

It was part of a much larger change in pharmacy, manufacturing, and cosmetics.

So Why Did We Stop Using Them?

This is where the story gets interesting.

It would be easy to say that people simply discovered that plant oils were better.

That's not really what happened.

Instead, several things changed at the same time.

Petroleum Changed Skin Care

Petroleum jelly was patented by Robert Chesebrough in 1872, and petroleum-derived ingredients quickly became useful in cosmetics and topical products. Mineral oil also became popular as refining made petroleum-derived ingredients inexpensive and abundant.

Petrolatum and mineral oil had some very practical advantages.

They were:

• consistent from batch to batch

• inexpensive to produce

• long-lasting

• odorless

• resistant to rancidity

• easy to manufacture on a large scale

Those are pretty significant advantages when you're making thousands—or eventually millions—of jars of product.

A locally rendered batch of lard could vary depending on the animal, rendering process, storage, and season.

A refined commercial ingredient could be manufactured to a much more predictable specification.

For a growing cosmetics and pharmaceutical industry, that mattered.

Plant Oils Became Easier to Produce and Use

Plant oils weren't new, of course.

Olive oil, sesame oil, and many other plant oils have been used in skin care and medicine for thousands of years.

What changed was the ability to process and manufacture oils on a much larger scale.

Advances in oil extraction and processing made plant oils increasingly practical as commercial ingredients. They also offered something consumers eventually came to appreciate: a lighter, more familiar feel on the skin.

As cosmetic chemistry advanced, formulators had an increasingly large selection of oils, waxes, emulsifiers, and other ingredients to work with.

Stability Became More Important

This is probably one of the biggest practical reasons animal fats lost their place.

Freshly rendered fat doesn't have the same shelf stability as a highly refined commercial oil or petroleum-derived ingredient.

It can oxidize and eventually become rancid.

That doesn't make lard or tallow bad ingredients.

It simply means you have to pay attention to how they're rendered, purified, stored, and used.

Commercial manufacturers needed ingredients that could sit on store shelves for long periods under varying conditions.

That requirement pushed the industry toward more stable, standardized ingredients.

Why I Choose Differently

For me, there's another part of this story that is personal.

I don't particularly like using petroleum-derived products on my skin, so when I'm making something for myself or choosing ingredients for my own products, I'd rather work with things like rendered tallow, lard, beeswax, and plant oils.

That's not me saying that everyone needs to make the same choice. It's simply how I prefer to approach my own skin care.

I also try to avoid hydrogenated oils in my food.

There is an important distinction here: the way a fat is processed matters, and hydrogenation is not the same thing as simply rendering an animal fat. I'm not suggesting that rendered tallow and hydrogenated vegetable oils are equivalent ingredients—they aren't.

For me, though, both choices come from the same general place: I like knowing what I'm working with and keeping my ingredients as straightforward as I reasonably can.

I don't need an ingredient to be old-fashioned just because it's old-fashioned.

But if I have a choice between a material I can understand, source locally, and prepare myself and one that requires a much more industrial process, I'll often choose the simpler option.

Carrier Oils Still Have Their Place

That doesn't mean I've abandoned carrier oils.

I use them.

Sunflower oil, olive oil, sweet almond oil, and other plant oils are useful ingredients, and some preparations are simply better suited to them.

The point isn't that tallow and lard should replace every carrier oil.

It's that we have choices.

A home herbalist can work with plant oils, animal fats, beeswax, or combinations of them.

You can choose based on the preparation you're making, the characteristics you want in the finished product, what you have available, and how you want to source your ingredients.

That's much more useful than deciding that one ingredient has to be the answer to everything.

Why I Still Like Using Tallow and Lard

For me, using tallow and lard isn't about trying to prove that animal fats are superior to every plant oil.

It's about using ingredients that make sense for the way I work.

I render both myself, using fat from local producers. That means I know where the raw material came from and I can control the rendering and straining process.

There's also something satisfying about taking something that might otherwise be discarded and turning it into an ingredient I can actually use.

And when I'm making a traditional-style salve or balm, I like the idea that I'm working with a material that has a long history of household use.

That's enough reason for me.

It doesn't mean I'll never use sunflower oil, olive oil, or another carrier oil.

Different oils and fats have different characteristics, and sometimes a plant oil is exactly what I want for a particular preparation.

Tallow, Lard, and Herbal Infusions

One of the places I find these fats particularly interesting is in herbal preparations.

Traditionally, fats could serve as a medium for carrying herbal ingredients into a topical preparation.

Today, we're much more accustomed to making an herbal-infused oil first and then using that oil to make a salve.

If you'd like to try making your own, I've shared my process in [How to Make an Herbal Infused Oil].

That's a very useful method, and it's the one I use often.

But it isn't the only way people have worked with herbs.

Historical herbal preparations used a variety of fats, oils, waxes, and other materials depending on what was available and what the preparation was intended to do.

The basic idea hasn't really changed:

Take something useful from the plant and put it into a form you can actually use.

The ingredients available to us have simply changed.

Bringing an Old Ingredient Back Into the Kitchen

One of the things I enjoy about herbalism is discovering that many of the materials we think of as old-fashioned weren't necessarily complicated.

People used what they had.

They rendered fat.

They dried herbs.

They infused oils.

They melted beeswax.

They made salves.

They stored what they made for later.

We have access to far more ingredients today than our great-grandparents did, and that's a wonderful thing. But having more choices doesn't mean we have to forget the older ones.

If you're just getting started with herbalism, you might also enjoy [Building Your Home Apothecary with 5 Common Herbs], where I introduce five useful plants to begin working with.

For me, using tallow and lard is simply another way of keeping some of that practical knowledge alive.

Not because everything old was better.

Not because everything modern is worse.

Just because sometimes an old ingredient still has a useful place on the shelf.

And sometimes the most interesting thing we can do with an old recipe is learn why people used it in the first place.

A Note on Using Animal Fats

If you're interested in experimenting with tallow or lard for your own preparations, start with properly rendered and well-purified fat.

The quality of the finished fat depends heavily on the raw material and rendering process.

Keep water and impurities out, store rendered fats appropriately, and pay attention to changes in smell, color, or texture that could indicate spoilage or oxidation.

And as with any new topical ingredient, test a small area first if you aren't sure how your skin will respond.

Traditional doesn't automatically mean risk-free—but it can still be worth understanding.