No. 110

To Prepare Larding Pork

Pour Preparer le Lard a Piquer

Lift the bands of pork leaving as little meat on as possible, from the first rib to the end of the loin; lay them in brine for three months, then drain off, and put them on a table to rub one by one and cover with salt. Set them one on top of the other in a cool, dry place and range a board over with a weight on top; turn them over, and throw on some salt, and at the end of a month change those from the bottom to the top, and three months after, fasten a strong twine to each piece, and hang them up separately in a cold, dark room to dry.

Another Way.—The piece of pork taken from the back is the only one to use for larding purposes, as it is firm and not liable to crack. Remove all the meat from it, and cut it into an oblong piece, this being called a band; salt it dry with fine salt for three or four weeks, and if it be necessary to use it shortly after its salting, then rub it with very fine salt, and hang it up in a dry and cool place. This pork must be salted toward the end of the winter; fat pork never receives more salt than it needs, whichever way it may be employed, or however long the operation may last.

← No. 109 Veal Udder Elementary Methods No. 111 To Cut Fat Pork for Larding →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a curing procedure for the strip of hard back fat used to lard lean roasts and game, and it cannot be followed safely today: the brine strength, the salt quantities and every temperature are left to the cook's judgment, and the finished fat is hung for months at unmeasured room conditions. What follows explains the vocabulary and where the procedure breaks down, not how to reproduce it.

What is being madeLard a piquer is not lard in the rendered sense but the firm subcutaneous fat from the pig's back, salted and dried until stiff enough to cut into strips and thread through lean meat with a larding needle. Ranhofer states that the piece taken from the back is the only one to use, as it is firm and not liable to crack; he does not discuss other cuts of fat.
"Band"A band is the oblong sheet of fat lifted off the back with the meat removed, roughly from the first rib to the end of the loin. No. 111, immediately afterward, deals with cutting that sheet for larding.
No brine specification"Lay them in brine for three months" gives neither salt concentration nor temperature. A brine too weak to inhibit bacteria looks and smells identical to one strong enough, and three months at an unknown temperature is long enough for that difference to matter.
"Cool, dry place" is not a temperatureThe text does insist the pork be salted "toward the end of the winter," and professional kitchens of the period depended on stone larders and cold cellars kept cold by the ambient season, but no temperature is stated anywhere. A modern pantry or garage may not hold those conditions, and the recipe supplies no way to check.
No curing salt, no measured cureThere is no nitrite or nitrate in either method, and the salt is applied by rubbing to appearance. Modern dry-cure practice for anything held for weeks at ambient temperature depends on weighed salt and, usually, weighed nitrite calculated against the weight of the meat. None of that is present here.
Months of ambient hangingMonths of salting and ambient hanging -- after months in brine and salt the pieces are hung by twine in a cold, dark room to dry for an unstated period, with no humidity or temperature control and no measured endpoint. There is no way for a home cook to verify that the cure has done its work.
If you want to lard a roastCommercially cured salt pork, or fresh fatback firmed in the freezer and cut into strips, will do the job the recipe is aiming at. For curing pork at home, use a current recipe with weighed salt and stated temperatures.

A Little History

Larding was a structural necessity in the era this book comes from: the lean cuts a professional kitchen roasted — veal, fillet, saddle of hare, game birds, the udder treated in the preceding entry — had almost no internal fat, and threading them with strips of hard back fat was the standard insurance against a dry roast. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, treats the preparation of larding pork as a basic stores operation rather than a recipe, which is why it sits in the Elementary Methods chapter alongside stocks and forcemeats; the text implies, though it does not say outright, that a large restaurant salted its own fat in late winter and drew on it through the year. The insistence that the work be done at the end of winter is a reminder that this is pre-mechanical-refrigeration practice, dependent on ambient cold in a stone larder. Larding faded from home cooking through the twentieth century as barding and brining made it unnecessary, and the larding needle is now mostly a curiosity in kitchen drawers.