Mind your language | 6 January 2007

With the intention of making us healthy they sell us meat now with no fat. What is the point? If you cook it, it shrivels into dry toughness. During the period we have just survived, when cooking large birds is customary, I was amused to come across this sentence from Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘When I bid them lard a Fowl, if I should bid them lard with large Lardoons, they would not know what I meant: But when I say they must lard with little Pieces of Bacon, they know what I mean.’

Lard in Old French meant bacon, hence lardoons. I have a larder at home, but I keep the bacon in the fridge. Some people call their larder a pantry, but that has nothing to do with pans. Of course it comes from the Latin panis, ‘bread’, but the connections with bread were fairly soon severed. There used to be an official in a big house called a panter or pantler who was originally in charge of the bread.