Certain joints of meat will dry out when roasted unless they are protected by a thin covering of bacon or sliced pork. These protective slices are called bards, a word whose history extends back thousands of years to the Persian pardah, meaning covering. The ancient Arabs adopted this Persian word, using it to mean pack-saddle, and then introduced it to the Italians, who spelt it barda and used it as a name for horse-armour, plates of metal or leather that protect a horse from sword-blows. When the French adopted the Italian term, they too initially used it to mean horse-armour but then transferred it from the battlefield to the kitchen, where they used it to refer to the protective slices of bacon. English then borrowed the culinary term in the late fifteenth century, changing its spelling to bard in the process. Incidentally, when scholars refer to Shakespeare as “The Immortal Bard,” they have another bard a non-bacon one in mind: the bard that means poet derives from an Old Celtic word that meant minstrel.
This culinary technique involves enveloping a piece of meat, often roast or braised, with delicate shavings of fatty meat or a singular slice of it.