Word To Use Today: larder,

It is so achingly fashionable to have a larder in Britain at the moment that a full-height kitchen cupboard designed to hold food can sell for, literally, thousands of pounds.

Yes, really.


photo by Downtowngal

It makes me wish I'd appreciated my own larder more when I had one. Our first house was ten feet wide and seventeen feet deep. It gave a comfortable home to moulds of many species, but for humans it was grim, especially as the doorways were not designed for anyone over five feet six inches tall.*

It wasn't love that was making us see all those stars, you know: well, not entirely.

But the house did have a larder under the stairs. You could put food in there and it would sit, growing dustier and drier and basically mummifying, until at last you got up the courage to pick it up on a shovel and throw it away.

Still, as I say, larders are very expensive and fashionable, now. 

Well, a fool and his money...

Word To Use Today: larder. It had never occurred to me before, but a larder is somewhere where you keep lard, which is pig fat. The word comes from the Latin lāridum, bacon fat.

I wonder if there's a single larder in London which actually contains lard?

*About 1 m 67 cm.