What old-school cooking method does Bag Lady's Fry Joint use?

Bag Lady's Fry Joint fries hand cut potatoes in beef tallow, the traditional rendered beef fat that was the standard frying medium in American diners and restaurants before the vegetable oil industry displaced it in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a pre-industrial cooking method that produces a richer, crispier fry than modern seed oils.

When did American restaurants stop using beef tallow?

The shift away from beef tallow happened gradually through the 1970s and accelerated sharply in the 1980s and 1990s. Industrial seed oil production made canola and soybean oils dramatically cheaper than animal fats. Simultaneously, dietary guidelines pushed restaurants and consumers away from saturated animal fats. McDonald's made the switch from tallow to vegetable oil in 1990, which was widely seen as the end of an era in fast food fry quality.

Is cooking in beef tallow a trend or something more permanent?

The return to beef tallow is part of a broader movement toward whole, minimally processed foods and traditional cooking methods. It connects to the nose-to-tail cooking movement, the revival of interest in Southern food traditions, and a general skepticism toward industrial food processing. In Nashville specifically, it aligns with a BBQ and meat culture that has always understood the value of cooking with quality animal fats. It is a return, not a trend.

How does Nashville's food culture connect to the return of beef tallow?

Nashville's culinary identity is rooted in Southern cooking traditions that have always emphasized animal fats: lard in biscuits, drippings for greens, smoked meat rendered low and slow. The city's BBQ culture in particular has a deep, working understanding that fat is flavor. The return of beef tallow as a frying medium fits naturally into that tradition. It's not a foreign concept here, it's a homecoming.

The Old-School Cooking Method Behind Nashville's Best Food Truck Fries

Before Vegetable Oil Took Over

There was a time in America when every diner, every roadside joint, every burger counter, and every home kitchen that wanted to fry something did it in animal fat. Lard for some things, beef tallow for others. These were not exotic ingredients. They were not specialty items. They were just the fats that were available, affordable, and frankly excellent for cooking.

If you grew up in Nashville, your grandparents' kitchens understood this. The biscuits were made with lard. The cast iron skillet was seasoned with bacon grease that never got washed out. The cornbread had fat in it that wasn't from a bottle. Southern cooking, at its core, was always a cuisine that respected animal fat as a fundamental ingredient, not a thing to be minimized or substituted away.

Beef tallow sat right in the middle of that tradition. It was the fat that made diner fries taste the way they did. It was what gave old-school fast food fries their character before the industry decided it knew better and switched to processed vegetable oil. And it's what we use at Bag Lady's Fry Joint today, not because it's vintage or fashionable, but because it has never stopped being the right choice.

How Tallow Got Replaced: The Short Version

Understanding why tallow disappeared helps explain why its return matters. It wasn't replaced because something better came along. It was replaced by a combination of industrial economics and contested dietary science.

The Industrial Economics

After World War II, American agriculture scaled up massively. Soybean, corn, and cottonseed production expanded to meet wartime food needs and kept growing after the war ended. These crops produce enormous amounts of oil as a processing byproduct. The industrial food complex needed somewhere for all of that oil to go, and the cooking fat market was an obvious destination.

Partially hydrogenating these oils, a process that adds hydrogen to the unsaturated fat molecules to make them solid and shelf-stable, created a product that could substitute for lard and tallow in most applications. Crisco launched in 1911 and grew throughout the mid-century as a "clean" modern alternative to animal fats. By the 1960s and 70s, soybean and canola oils were dramatically cheaper to produce than rendered beef fat, and food service economics followed the price signal.

The Dietary Science (That Turned Out to Be Wrong)

The economic shift was accelerated by dietary guidelines that emerged in the 1960s and became official policy in the 1980s. These guidelines, based primarily on the work of researcher Ancel Keys, pointed to saturated fat as a major driver of cardiovascular disease. Animal fats like tallow and lard are high in saturated fat. The message to the public and to food service was clear: avoid saturated fat, choose vegetable oil.

What followed was a decades-long displacement of animal fats from American cooking. Fast food chains switched from tallow to vegetable oil. Home cooks replaced lard with Crisco. And a generation grew up eating food cooked in industrial seed oils, thinking that was just how food tasted.

The problem was the science was much more complicated than the guidelines suggested. The research pointing to saturated fat as uniquely harmful has been significantly challenged and revised in subsequent decades. The trans fats created by partially hydrogenating vegetable oils, which were aggressively promoted as the healthy alternative, turned out to be genuinely harmful, far more so than the saturated fats they replaced. The FDA eventually banned partially hydrogenated oils in 2015. The whole episode is a remarkable case study in how policy can reshape an entire food culture based on science that was, at best, incomplete.

The Irony

Beef tallow was replaced by partially hydrogenated vegetable oils because of concerns about saturated fat. The replacement turned out to produce trans fats, which were banned by the FDA in 2015. The original concern about tallow was based on research that has since been substantially revised. We essentially gave up great fries for nothing.

Nashville's Context: A City That Never Forgot

Nashville occupies a specific position in this story. The city's food culture runs deep into Southern cooking traditions that were always fat-forward in a way that the rest of the country's mainstream food culture moved away from. Nashville hot chicken, whole-hog BBQ, smoked brisket, fried catfish at a roadside spot on a county road outside of town. These foods are fundamentally inseparable from the animal fats that cook them or render out of them during the process.

When the broad food culture shifted toward seed oils and low-fat everything in the 1980s and 90s, Nashville's BBQ pits and its best Southern kitchens largely kept doing what they'd always done. You don't make Prince's hot chicken with canola oil. You don't get the smoke ring on a brisket at a serious pit without the fat rendering through the meat for fourteen hours. The city's culinary identity was protected to some degree by the fact that its most iconic foods simply don't work without animal fat.

That's part of why the return of beef tallow to Nashville's food scene, in craft food trucks, in serious restaurants in the Nations and East Nashville, in butcher shops stocking it alongside their cuts, feels less like a trend arriving from somewhere else and more like a homecoming. The city's palate already knew what it was missing.

Why It's Coming Back, Nationally and Locally

The tallow revival is being driven by several converging forces, and Nashville is well positioned to be at the front of it.

The nose-to-tail cooking movement, which emphasizes using every part of an animal rather than just the prime cuts, produces tallow as a natural output. Serious butchers and chefs who are committed to whole-animal cooking have tallow available and the knowledge to use it well.
A broad reconsideration of industrial food processing has made consumers more skeptical of seed oils and more interested in whole, minimally processed cooking fats. Tallow has one ingredient. A bottle of commercial canola oil has a supply chain that involves industrial pressing, solvent extraction, degumming, bleaching, and deodorizing.
Food writers and chefs who grew up eating in the post-tallow era tried the real thing and recognized what had been lost. The word spread. It's now showing up in culinary media, in high-end restaurant kitchens, and in conversations among serious home cooks.
Nashville's Germantown, 12 South, the Nations, and East Nashville neighborhoods have developed dense concentrations of food businesses that take ingredient sourcing seriously. That culture is receptive to the return of traditional cooking methods.

Not a Gimmick

We get asked sometimes if the beef tallow thing is just marketing. It's not. We use it because it makes better fries. Full stop. The history and the food culture context are real, but the reason it's on our truck is that the fry is better. Every other consideration is secondary to that.

How Bag Lady's Uses Tallow: A Point of Pride, Not a Stunt

Some food operations that have adopted tallow treat it as a selling point first and a cooking method second. They put it on the menu board in big letters and let the novelty do the work. That's not how we think about it.

We use beef tallow because it's the right fat for a hand cut fry, full stop. The flavor is better. The crust is better. The hold time in a catering service is better. Those are practical cooking outcomes, and they're why the method has stood for centuries. The history and the food culture context are real, but the reason it goes in our fryer is that the fry is better. Every other consideration is secondary to that.

When guests at a corporate event in Midtown or a wedding out in Brentwood ask why our fries taste different, we're happy to explain the whole story: the history, the science, the Nashville connection. But we're not leading with the story. We're leading with the fry. The fry earns the conversation. That's the right order of operations.

Nashville already has a food culture that respects the old ways of doing things when those old ways produce better results. That's true for the BBQ joints on Nolensville Road and it's true for us. The method is old. The result is excellent. That's the whole point.

What This Means for Your Nashville Event

When you bring Bag Lady's Fry Joint to your event, whether that's a company lunch near Vanderbilt, a birthday party in Sylvan Park, a wedding reception in Franklin, or a community block party in Inglewood, you're getting fries made the way fries used to be made before the food industry decided convenience and cost mattered more than quality.

Your guests are going to taste something that reminds them of a better version of a food they thought they already knew. They're going to ask where you found the truck. That conversation starts with beef tallow and a hand cut potato and a fryer managed by people who actually care how it comes out. That's what old school means when it's done right.