Field Notes - Larders

Larders. Everyone either has one or wants one. Even the word is a delight to say. Lah-dah....lah-dee-dah, I'm in the lah-dah.. The word of course, has Latin roots, and derives from Lardum - meaning pork fat or what we now call bacon. It was (and still should be) a kitchens inner sanctum. A holy place, robust and well-filled with strong white ceramics and jarred beans and jams. It's an interior designers dream..

Where kitchen necessities go to be instagrammed. But larders are places that call to us. They sound cool and buttery, stone floors and stone-ware, striped jugs and good milk; perhaps inscribed with wise, grandmotherly apothegms, crocheted with care, that remind us to “Buy less, choose well, make last.” Happiness is surely, the satisfying sigh of walking into a goodly-stocked larder.

Another larder-based term, which we almost no longer dare use, comes from “larding” - smothering our meat with thick layers of fat, to preserve it through the coming Winter. A time of necessity, not choice. With a properly provisioned larder and plenty of oil for the lamps, two fortnights of deep, crisp and even snow, would be a household lock-in that I for one, would most relish.

Planned and purposed, these rooms, spaces or even cupboards, are places of elegant sufficiency. They might have been renamed as pantries, which is fine, but we need to try and bring them back in their look and feel; wherever the space will allow. Larders are altars to nostalgia and the product of elegant, generational ritual. We should attempt to re-engage here. It is a sense of fulfilment that, unlike most, is mostly within reach.

The best larders were temples of order and practical good sense. Shelves, hooks, jars and bins. Optimal order, never lightly undertaken. Home to the pickled, the cured, the smoked and the salted. Nowadays, we just call that “Rehab".