There's a thing you can find, mostly in Brooklyn, called lard bread. It's bread, with cured pork baked right into it, and it's not the slightest bit embarrassed about its name. We had ours imported from Brooklyn's .
Eva: Now I know when people call me "lard bread" they mean it as a compliment.
Miles: Hard outside with a ham surprise inside. This is the closest we'll ever come to a meat piñata.
Robert: It's called "lard bread?" This is a meal with a PR problem.
Ian: Just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover. Speaking of which, I'd read a lot more if books had secret ham hiding in them.
Peter: I understand U.S. Customs seizes 1,000 loaves of "cocaine bread" a year. The smugglers should probably change the name.
Ian: Sure, fill bread with cured pork and it's "delicious." Fill me with cured pork and I'm "eating my feelings."
Peter: From now on I'm going to tear open every loaf of bread I get like it's a present on Christmas morning. And be horribly disappointed, much as I was on Christmas morning, because I'm Jewish.
Miles: This is really something you can only do with meat. No one's excited to find a hidden piece of kale in their bread.
Robert: Lard bread will never make it with a name like that. Nobody bought raisin bread back when we called it "shriveled up dead grape bread."
Ian: They said a guy named Barack Obama could never get elected. You say something named lard bread will never sell. My point is this bread should command the armed forces.
Miles: Beltway politics are just too rough — he'd be eaten alive.
Eva: Interestingly enough, "lard bread" was a pet name for President William Howard Taft.
Eva: So it's not really lard bread. What's bread with actual blobs of lard in it called?
Miles: Delicious.
Robert: Twinkies.
[The verdict: delicious. Perfect. There's some debate about who makes the best lard bread, so if you're in Brooklyn, it's probably best to try them all.]
Thanks to Dan Pashman of for pointing us toward lard bread, thus changing our lives forever.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.