The fat that needs nothing
Lardo di Colonnata.
I bought my first slices from Marco, the salumiere at the Saturday market in Marina di Pietrasanta, my town. A few euros, ten slices, on waxed paper. I walked home, tore off a piece of unsalted Tuscan bread, and ate the ten slices standing at the kitchen counter. No plate. No fork. Nothing else. When the slices were gone, I considered going back for more, and only the dignity of seeing this through twice stopped me.
The slices were almost translucent. White, faintly pink, the rind dark, the surface still grainy with salt and pepper and rosemary from however long they had spent in the conca, the marble tub, before being shaved off the block. They had no smell in the paper. Ten seconds on warm bread, and they had a strong smell. The pepper showed up first. Then the garlic, late and quiet. Then the fat itself, which is not fat the way American bacon is fat, or Hungarian szalonna is fat, or English back bacon is fat. It is closer to butter than to bacon, except that butter does not taste of pork, and this did. Faintly. At depth. The way a cellar tastes of wine, even when the wine is not in the room.
A few things you should know.
There is no smoke involved. None. Anywhere. This matters if, like me, you grew up in a country where preserving pork is built on smoke. In Hungary, the belly of the pig goes into salt and then into a smokehouse for days, sometimes finished with paprika and garlic, and the result is dense, ferocious, mineral. Szalonna takes over a stew the way a strong personality takes over a dinner. I love it. My stomach can take only a little at a time. A slice of bread with paprika paste is called katonák, soldiers.
Lardo is the opposite logic. Salt and time, no smoke. Slow Mediterranean curing, the same logic as guanciale and pancetta, finished in marble instead of in a cellar. The cavatori, the marble quarrymen of the Apuan Alps, perfected it. They cut tubs from the fine-grained marble of the Canaloni basin (the only Apuan marble that worked), rubbed the inside with garlic, layered the fat with sea salt, black pepper, fresh garlic, fresh rosemary, and up to twenty other spices depending on the family recipe. They closed the tub with marble and left it in an unaired room for at least six months, often a year, sometimes two. The salt drew water out of the fat by osmosis, creating a brine called salamora, and the fat sat in the brine and slowly became something else.
In the 1990s, the EU sanitary authorities tried to ban it. Marble is porous; porous can’t be sterilized to industrial-food standards; therefore, the lardo had to come out of the marble and go into aluminum. The producers fought back. So did, of all people. The Slow Food movement, which now has chapters on five continents, more or less began with a pile of pork fat in a marble box on a hillside above Carrara. The IGP came in 2004. The cavatori had been right.
Colonnata, when I drove up the next weekend, was less of a tourist scene than I’d feared. The road ends at the village. The village is small and steep and faces the cave directly. Stand in the central square with a crostino (Tuscan bread, one shaving of lardo half-melted on top), and you eat across at the white wound in the mountain where the marble that made your conca was cut. If you go: one crostino, one coffee, the view. That’s the visit. You don’t need to drive up to eat the lardo. Marco’s slices were as good as anything I tasted in Colonnata. Same product, different view.
You can buy lardo 3 ways. Each one tells you what to do with it.
Sliced, razor-thin. This is how Marco sold it to me and how most non-Italians meet it. Eat it on bread. Alone. In a Tuscan trattoria, it shows up as antipasto, sometimes by itself, sometimes on grilled bread with a single drop of warm honey, sometimes (in the more rigorous places) with nothing at all. Three or four slices of bread are also the canonical opening before a bistecca alla fiorentina, on the theory that you can’t prepare for a serious piece of beef with anything other than its own family of substances.
In a chunk, by the kilo. This is the cavatore’s form, and the form a Hungarian recognizes immediately, because it’s how we sell szalonna: a brick, dense and white, cut at home over a wooden board with a sharp knife and a glass of something within reach. The chunk-buying habit is the working person’s habit. The fat lasts in a cool larder for months and feeds you when you need feeding.
Rendered into a spread. The grandmother’s form, the cook’s form. A spoonful melted into a ragù in the last twenty minutes does what no quantity of olive oil can do. Gives the sauce a body and a faintly cured depth that nothing else replaces. The least flashy and the most useful.
What you don’t do, what nobody who has thought about this for five minutes does, is dress lardo up. Lardo is not bacon. Bacon is a flavoring agent. Lardo is a finished thing. You don’t lay it over chicken to make the chicken better. You don’t pair it with strong cheeses. You don’t (and I’ve seen this at restaurants that should know better) wrap it around a scallop and grill it. The moment lardo meets direct heat for any length of time, it becomes a translucent puddle of grease, and you’ve destroyed in thirty seconds something that took a year to make. Warm a slice gently on hot bread. That’s the limit.
I’ll eat Hungarian szalonna the rest of my life. A good piece of British back bacon, when I find one in Italy, has its place at my table on a Sunday. I also love my fair share of American bacon with eggs. None of them can be eaten alone. American bacon raw is not a food. Szalonna on bread is a meal because the smoke and the paprika do the lifting. British bacon needs a pan and the Full English (unrelated, but may God bless the United Kingdom for the Full English, the best, and I mean the absolutely best breakfast in the entire planet, thank you, Brits, thank you).
Lardo di Colonnata is the only one that needs nothing. Not a pan, not a spice, not another ingredient. A piece of unsalted Tuscan bread is the most you should ask of it, and even that is a courtesy. The fat is the dish. The cavatori knew this. They took it into the cave at six in the morning, on a piece of bread, and they came home alive, which is a thing you can’t say of every cavatore on every shift, and the fat had done its part.
There is no recipe at the end of this. You buy the fat. You eat it.
