Lard is soft white fat from a pig used in cooking. A spoonful of lard, fry in lard, lard pastry.
It makes the flakiest pastry there is because its fat crystals are large and stay separate in the dough. It fell out of favour and is coming back, since the science that condemned it was about the hardened vegetable fats that replaced it. Note larder, from the same root.
1nounlardSoft white pig fat used in cooking.
“In the old days, people fried their potatoes in lard.”
lard is a fat.
Old French lard means bacon, from Latin lardum, bacon fat. A larder was originally where the bacon was kept.
Latin
lārdum
Old French
lard — bacon
Middle English
lard
English, today
lard
Built from
From Middle English lard, from Old French lard (“bacon”), from Latin lārdum, lāridum (“bacon fat”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA