La Voz de Galicia – May 17, 2026 →
‘Old lard makes better soup’ is one of those phrases I always hear from my mother. Most of the time it’s her answer to some joke I make about the fact that she’s in her eighties; other times she says it just because it comes to mind, because something at that moment triggers her to remember it. This week, during one of our video calls, I asked her what she meant when she says that phrase, and, as usual, she didn’t really answer. But the question led her to tell me that in her house the lard never got to be old, because they would run out of it, and that sometimes her father had to bring pork fat from Castile to complete the soup because they no longer had any lard left. And I found myself thinking about the reasons they never had enough of it —‘there were eight of us every day, a pot every day’ — and I asked her whether it wasn’t common to ask neighbors for lard, and she replied: ‘Only in rich houses did they have old lard.’
The conversation went on. I told her I wanted to write a column about it, and she muttered: ‘Well, you can read it to me then, because I find your columns very hard to read.’ And I told her that I write the way I speak, and she said she had never learned to read in Galician, and that was why it was so difficult for her…She, like so many others of her generation and circumstances, learned to read between fields and fairs, and in those days those readings were not in Galician.
My mother’s spoken language is that soup made with aged lard full of richness. And I am aware that it is impossible to convey such a complex flavor through writing, but, despite that, I try to do it every week, through these columns that are so hard for the woman who teaches me every day the beauty of invisible Galician.
