According to Mary Enig in Know Your Fats: "Shortening is the term used
to designate a fat in its anhydrous form (anhydrous means that it does
not contain any water) generally used for baking. Animal fats that are
shortening are lard and tallow. Most of the shortenings currently in
commercial use are partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil or
partially hydrogenated canola oil. These shortenings are usually solid
in texture. There are also shortenings used for commercial frying called
liquid shortenings that are pourable" (p.269)

In Food Science shortening generally refers to what we call 'plastic
fat' -- the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils as in crisco. It is
still sold, used ubiquitously in commercial products and the major
source of harmful transfats. Technically margarine is not shortening.

If you want to see inside the edible oil industry see:
http://www.iseo.org/foodfats.htm Frightening stuff. Fats should be eaten
more or less in their natural state not processed.

Mary Enig and Sally Fallon have a good article on fats:
http://www.westonaprice.org/know_your_fats/skinny.html

[log in to unmask] wrote:
> Could you tell me what "shortening" is. I've seen it in the context of baking and thouht it to be a mixture of fat and flour but later on I've got the idea that it is plain margarine. If it is, why do you call it shortening and not just fat or margarine? I'm just now reading an article of Mary Enig so it's important to know what she's talking about.
> Thanks in advance
> Eva

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