Larding the process of introducing thin strips of pork fat (lardoons) into meat which lacks fat and would otherwise cook dry (e.g. venison, veal, pigeons). Fat, usually back fat, is cut into strips, pinched into the clip of a larding needle, and gently inserted into the meat.
Stobart (1980) comments that the popularity of the technique in France had the result that: ‘In French cookery books of the last century almost every joint looked like a hedgehog.’ He adds, on a modern note, that a gadget is available, on the lines of a surgeon’s trocar (a tube cut diagonally and sharpened at one end), which permits ‘larding’ with frozen butter; and that cooks wishing to do something similar with polyunsaturated oils can manage with a large hypodermic syringe.
