Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

dripping (drippings in USA), the fat that drips from joints of meat, especially beef, when they are roasted. Stobart (1980), harking back to the days ‘when meat really had fat on it’, says:

When cold and solidified, some brown meat jelly was usually trapped and preserved under the fat. When the fat (especially of beef dripping) was mixed with the jelly, salted, and spread on toast, it used to be a standard—and delicious—appetite stopper for farm workers and children at tea time on raw evenings in winter or after skating. Dripping was also commonly clarified and used as a cooking fat. In that case, the distinction between dripping and rendered fat is mainly one of usage. Chicken fat, so much a part of Jewish cooking, is not called ‘chicken dripping’.