Jonathan Gold writes about Lardo — "slabs of pure, white hog lard cured for months in special coffin-shaped basins hewn from marble" — in the latest LA Weekly.
At Dario Cecchini’s famous butcher shop in Panzano, the one featured in the best-selling kitchen memoir Heat, his version of lardo is whipped into a stiff, shiny paste that billows from his meat case like Miracle Whip. In the Val d’Aosta, chunks of pickled lardo bob in canning jars. Artisanal meat men in south Tuscany make a kind of lardo too, from the fat of plump, lovely Cinta Senese pigs, a local breed of black swine that look as if they have the white belts of Elvis impersonators wrapped around their midsections.
If you are very, very lucky in Italy, you can sometimes find somebody to grill a thick steak over a hot olive-wood fire, then gild it with just enough lardo to dissolve into the meat and scent it with the supreme fragrance of rosemary, spices and profoundly matured pork.
(Chris Bassett took this nice photo of slabs of lardo for sale.)
