Latent lardism?

06/29/09

Latent lardism?

Filed under: Blog— by joe @ 12:05:30 pm Permalink

Readers Ellen and Linda both pointed out last week that part of the reason lard fell into disrepute in the middle of the last century was because of its association with poverty. I think that's at least partly true. If you look around at all the places where lard has been popular (the American south, rural Mexico, Hungary, Italy, France, the list goes on...), one thing that's common to them all, at least historically, is poverty. As I wrote last week, pigs are terrific poor peoples' food. They're easy to take care of, they grow quickly, breed prolifically and eat just about anything.

Of course, these days poor peoples' food is all the rage (except of course among the poor). However in the past one of the ways people of wealth distinguished themselves from poor people was by avoiding the things they wore, ate and drank. It's been observed that haute cuisine contains very few pork dishes relative to other meats. I've never thought about that particular point, but on the face of it, it rings true.

I think if most of us (at least here in America) are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that one of the first associations most of us have with the word "lard" is poor southern and/or hillbilly folk. Does that make us all closet "lardists" in some way? I think it does, and suggest that, as penance, we all eat more lard.

Pingbacks:

No Pingbacks for this post yet...


Hello, Joe!


Categories

Joe Pastry

Archives

September 2010
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
 << <   > >>
    1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30      

Search




Links

RSS 2.0 feed