[Sca-cooks] bacon, lardo etc

[JIMCHEVAL at aol.com]

In French at least "lard" can be problematic. Typically it means bacon, but 
 there are contexts where it clearly means something more like lard in the  
American sense. )"Saindoux" is rendered lard.) American bacon in France is 
'lean  bacon"; French bacon in general is thicker even today. Anthimus says 
that the  Franks loved raw bacon as a treat, which seems to imply they 
simply cut it off  the animal; but since bacon can imply some preservation it is 
not sure if he  meant a smoked and/or salted piece of raw bacon. But 
certainly it had a lot of  fat on it, since he discusses using it as a kind of 
ointment.
 
If this is hard to visualize, I actually saw an episode of "Nightline"  
where an Inuit clubbed a baby seal to death in front of the (horrified)  
interviewer and then proceeded to cut off a bit of the animal and chew on it, so  
it's not like people in a hunting-based society would necessarily be shy 
about  eating the animal raw. The early Scots (and maybe the early Germans) 
would  simply beat the blood out of freshly killed animals and eat the meat 
(when you  think about it, building a fire in a snowy forest could have been a 
problem at  times).
 
Jim  Chevallier
_www.chezjim.com_ (http://www.chezjim.com/) 

FRENCH BREAD HISTORY:  Seventeenth century bread
http://leslefts.blogspot.com/2016/02/french-food-history-seventeenth-century
.html









In a message dated 11/11/2016 10:41:45 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,  
stefanlirous at gmail.com writes:

So what  are the definitions of these three+ items? We’ve already discussed 
that  medieval ”bacon” is most likely not what Americans call bacon and 
may be  different from what the Canadians consider  bacon.