To Lard:
Mangalitsa Shares
There is a burden in great abundance. The Mangalitsa is a lard pig. Her primary yield is fat. There was a time when lean bacon was fit only for those with a sickly appetite who "lack the sweet sauce of labor."
Today, fat is a burden. But our sickly appetites aren't all to blame. Soy based feed and selection of fast growing, lean genes produce bitter fat. Sickly pigs make bad pork fat.
But an old european peasant pig, growing slowly for two years, valued for her lard, foraging acorns and hazelnuts is a different animal entirely. Her fat is good for you and good to you, a harmony that defies the terrestrial bounds of probability.
The fat is not only edible, but mild, protected by oak tannins from rancidity. The flesh is red and everything is balanced with the underlying mineral sweetness of the earth from which the feed is derived. This is the effect of pre-modern silva pasture, or pannage at
Uneven Ground Farm.
But it can still be a trial to utilize this unmitigated bounty of fat in the kitchen. With this in mind, I have emulated the well-off frugality of the peasant kitchen, specifically the Hungarian kitchen, the historical telos of mangalitsa pigs.
As always, this Meatsmith harvest is guided by two axioms: no trimming and make everything delicious. For a lard pig, this means that everything is to be cured, ground or rendered.
Szalonna (like
lardo), back bacon,
coppa and
sonka replace chops, shoulder roasts and leg steaks. The share includes a larding needle for sewing strips of sweet fat into lean roasts at home.
My goal, and if the last decade is any indication, perhaps my destiny, is to make this fat useful to you. In fact,
lard appeared as a verb in writing a century before it was written as a noun. So it is not enough to say what it is. To be known, it must be eaten. When its use is manifested, it changes from a burden to a salubrious renaissance.
I offer you the
Mangalitsa Half Pig Share. When given the choice between ordinary lean pork and the surreal lipid deposits of a woolen lard pig, there can be only one answer:
