Praise the lard: the white fat makes a culinary comeback
Lard is not an appealing word. When Silvio Berlusconi allegedly used it as the crux of an unrepeatable comment about Angela Merkel in 2014 (which he has since denied), it wouldn’t have been meant as a compliment. The image conjured was fleshy, flabby and congealed.
Yet the word that gave us the name for where we keep our food (“larder”) also denotes an animal fat that was once a staple of the western diet. It suffered at the hands of 20th-century diet scientists but is now making a noticeable comeback.
Lard is rendered pig fat and while it is not quite the new coconut oil (UK sales of lard crept up by just over £100,000 in 2017 from 2016, according to Statista), chefs are embracing it as the fat du jour.
In 2018, Alain Weissgerber, head chef at two-Michelinstarred restaurant Taubenkobel in Austria, served bread not with butter but with lard at a prestigious 15-course meal I happened to be at. It tasted rather like smoked cream.
“Every restaurant serves homemade butter and believes it is the best one. We wanted to do something different,” says Weissgerber.
But his novelty may not last long. Lard is clogging up menus at all kinds of restaurants, at all times of day.
At the glitzy Del Posto in New York, lard comes spread on focaccia. In London, you can eat lard five times a day, from seasoned lard with herring at Borealis near London Bridge for brunch, to squid and pork lardo skewers at Yotam Ottolenghi’s newest restaurant, Rovi.
Like any cut of meat, the quality of lard varies according to where it is on the pig. For pastry chefs, who use it to shorten a pie crust, the best fat comes from the abdominal cavity and around the kidneys — “flare” or “leaf” fat. For those who fry with it or eat it as the charcuterie “lardo”, the thicker and spongier back fat is ideal.
While he pulls two rosy lumps of fat out of a plastic bag to demonstrate the difference between back and flare fat, Sean Cannon, who runs charcuterie business Cannon & Cannon, shows me what it becomes once rendered and cured.
Cannon’s lardo — as the cured version is known — comes from the Large Black pig, bred specifically for charcuterie. It is leaf-thin and melts at tongue temperature. I can only imagine this is what it would be like to eat silk, albeit better seasoned.
Records of lard consumption stretch back to the ancient Greeks. In The Iliad, when Achilles prepares a feast for Odysseus, the showcase is “a great chine of wild hog, rich in lard”. And until the 1970s, lard was a regular part of the British diet. The average consumption was 55g per week in 1974 (compared with today’s 35g of butter). Today it is less than 5g. The trend is similar in the US. Why did it all but vanish from our cupboards?
Lard and lardo are victims of a fear of fat that started spreading in the 1950s. According to Nina Teicholz, who spent nine years investigating American dietary science for her book The Big Fat Surprise, it can be credited to one man: Ancel Benjamin Keys.
By Teicholz’s account, Keys was a biologist at the University of Minnesota with a penchant for self-promotion and a flair for bullish certainty about his findings. He believed that the number one cause of heart disease was fat. His most famous research is known as the Seven Countries Study, which started in 1956. By choosing countries that suited his hypothesis — and including men from Crete who were on a Lenten fast that excluded meat and cheese — he seemed to prove that those who ate a lowfat, so-called Mediterranean diet were less likely to die from coronary problems.
The American Heart Association endorsed his research and the low-fat diet was officially recommended to the US public in 1961 — the same year that Keys appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Such was Keys’s influence that experts who found themselves on the “wrong” side of the cholesterol debate, such as medical professor George V Mann, lost research grants.
The image of an artery clogged up with lard is an easy one to buy into, observes Nick Barnard, food campaigner and author of Eat Right. “What Keys did was create a whole new anxiety around saturated fat. It was a really simple message.”
But the science is now being revised. A 2010 study coauthored by Ronald M Krauss, a heart specialist at the University of California, reviewed 21 studies that covered more than 347,000 participants. He found no link between saturated fat and heart disease.
Saturated fat — the fat found mostly in animal products such as butter, tallow, ghee and lard
— is made up of two types of cholesterol. One, known as low-density lipoprotein (LDL), is linked with greater likelihood of heart disease. The other (highdensity lipoprotein, or HDL) is not and reduces the levels of its more harmful partner.
Nonetheless, lard is still a victim of its globular image. “When you think of a big vat of fat it is quite overwhelming,” says Jeremy Lee, head chef at London’s Quo Vadis. He hazards that it is not the health argument that is causing enthusiasts to sniff out good lard but a craving for authentic food: “It is part of the vast unearthing and archaeological dig into British cooking.” And it’s also sustainable, he says, “a vital part of eating all the animal”.
Lard novices might wish to begin with the menu at Marksman, Michelin’s 2017 pub of the year, where chef Jon Rotheram rests all the meat in lard rendered on site because “the fat is so flavoursome”.
Or at two-Michelin-starred pub The Hand and Flowers in Marlow, where Tom Kerridge leaves a traditional British lardy cake for guests in all the rooms.