Rillettes and rillons, the former often sold in brown-glazed stoneware mugs of various sizes, are on sale throughout France, but I look in vain, even in Tours itself, for a quiche tourangelle. I always end up buying the rillettes and rillons, and making one myself. In England, of course, you have to make everything yourself—unless you are in easy distance of Soho. It’s worth doing this in large quantity. Rillettes and potted rillons can be kept for months, so you have a ready-to-hand hors d’œuvre, or the basic materials for a quiche tourangelle, which most people would find adequate as a main dish.

In France, don’t make the mistake of asking for lard if you want lard. Lard is the French for bacon, and very expensive it is too. Where we might use it in pâtés or daubes, the French housewife would use thin strips of pork fat, or salt pork, or a slice of fresh belly of pork. This is worth following, the result is blander and less aggressive. If you intend to make your own fat pork dishes, it is worth searching for stoneware pots (pots de grès) in which to preserve them. Not earthenware. Its coarser clay and glaze need firing at a low temperature, which means that the glaze chips easily, and the body is frequently porous and easily cracked, making sterilization impossible. Wide-mouthed French preserving jars (bocal, pi. bocaux) are excellent (Kilner jars are quite all right though the narrower openings are not so convenient). French bazaars are the best places to get suitable preserving containers—they cost very little, and there are many attractive shapes to choose from. A bazaar is not a few stalls and a bran tub opened by the squire’s wife, but a most useful emporium where you may buy a wide range of things from hair-grips to saucepans, toys, and household china both useful (storage jars, casseroles) and frivolous (wild duck plaques, of a garishness only the French could achieve).

The different sorts of pork fat are:

La panne (flair, flare, flay, flead, flick, leaf fat), a sheet or layer of fat forming an interior covering to the loin, and enveloping the kidneys. Best taken from bacon pigs, and used for the best lard, boudins blancs, and fine pâtés.

Lard de poitrine—the fat belly-cut, which includes the hard fat lying under the skin, the lean meat and the softer fat. When cured, or cured and smoked, this gives green or smoked streaky bacon. In France this self-basting cut is used for rillons, rillettes, and petit sale (salt belly of pork, by the charcutier, and as an enriching ingredient in beef stews by the housewife.

Gras dur (back fat, speck), the hard layer of fat under the skin (couenne), can be salted for keeping, melted for good-quality lard, or used fresh in sausages, stuffings, pâtés and for larding. Expertly-cut slices of this hard fat are tied neatly round lean joints of beef for roasting, or poultry, or game, to keep them moist.

Cras mou or fondant includes the poorer quality fat immediately touching the lean pork, and all the scrapings (les ratis) of fat which surround the intestines and the mesentery (mudgeon, gut fat, crow or frill) which holds the intestines in place. This fat provides an inferior lard, which should not be mixed in with the fine lard coming from the flair and hard back fat.

Creépine (caul, veil, kell) is a veil of fat surrounding the stomach. Made pliable in tepid water, it is wrapped round lean meat for roasting, or pâtés, faggots and gayettes, to provide a permanent basting layer.