[Sca-cooks] Lardo, prosciutto blanco

[Johnna Holloway]

I've noticed all the conversations about pigs and chorizo.
I thought people might like the following out of
from Bill Buford's new volume entitled Heat.

Batali....arrived bearing his own quince-flavored grappa ...;
a jar of homemade nocino ...; an armful of wine;
and a white, dense slab of lardo—literally, the raw “lardy”
back of a very fat pig, one he’d cured himself with herbs and salt. . .

Not long into it, he’d cut the lardo into thin slices and,
with a startling flourish of intimacy, laid them individually
on our tongues, whispering that we needed to let the fat melt
in our mouths to appreciate its intensity.
The lardo was from a pig that, in the last months of its
seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound life, had lived on apples, walnuts, and cream
(“The best song sung in the key of pig”), and Mario convinced us
that, as the fat dissolved, we’d detect the flavors of the animal’s 
happy diet—
there, in the back of the mouth. No one that evening had
knowingly eaten pure fat before
(“At the restaurant, I tell the waiters to call it prosciutto bianco”), and
by the time Mario had persuaded us to a third helping everyone’s heart 
was racing.

Mario also talks about here
http://www.forumusadelaware.org/news.asp?details=38

Johnnae