The term “lardcore” (lard + hardcore) was coined by food writer Josh Ozersky in Time magazine on October 27. 2010. Ozersky wrote:
 
“But a slew of young chefs are taking modern Southern cooking to a new place, forming a movement in the crucible of high ideals, virtuoso technique and hard-core attitude. Call it lardcore. It’s meticulous, it’s ballsy and it doesn’t care what you think of it. In that, it’s very Southern.”
 
“Ruth Bourdain” (Josh Friedland) defined the term “lardcorists” in Comfort Me with Offal: Ruth Bourdain’s Guide to Gastronomy (2012). The Urban Dictionary has a 2006 entry for “lardcore,” but it’s defined as “A mispronunciation of the term ‘hardcore’ now used to describe the morbidly obese.”
 
   
Urban Dictionary
lardcore
adj. 1. (parody) A mispronunciation of the term “hardcore” now used to describe the morbidly obese.
also “lardXcore”
Oh. My. God. Sam Conners is SO lardcore.
by Aryq Nov 15, 2006
 
Time magazine
Taste of America
Lardcore: Southern Food with Hard-Core Attitude
By Josh Ozersky Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010
Here’s the thing about Southern food: For most of our history, it was the best food in the country, prepared in the warmest and most fertile region, where biscuits and bacon practically spring out of the earth. (The vegetables are pretty good too.) But the higher quality the ingredients, the less you have to do with them, and so Southern culinary life was, until relatively recently, a long tryptophan trance of country ham, collards simmered endlessly in pork fat, creamy pan gravies and other agents of stultifying bliss. Food that good needs little in the way of adornment, and such efforts over the years generally flopped.
 
But a slew of young chefs are taking modern Southern cooking to a new place, forming a movement in the crucible of high ideals, virtuoso technique and hard-core attitude. Call it lardcore. It’s meticulous, it’s ballsy and it doesn’t care what you think of it. In that, it’s very Southern.
     
Charleston (SC) City Paper
October 27, 2010
GQ, Bon Appétit pile on the Chucktown love train
Stories on “lardcore,” hot spots, and EVO pizza too
by Stephanie Barna
(...)
In his weekly food column for TIME.com, Josh Ozersky coins the food word of the year — lardcore — to describe the Southern food movement being led by our own Chef Sean Brock.
 
The Huffington Post
Lardcore: The New Southern Cuisine
First Posted: 10/27/10 11:41 AM ET Updated: 05/25/11 07:10 PM ET
Josh Ozersky at Time.com: ...
 
Google Books
Comfort Me with Offal:
Ruth Bourdain’s Guide to Gastronomy
By Ruth Bourdain (Josh Friedland)
Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing
2012
Pg. ?:
Lardcorists: Chefs and their followers who profess a commitment to “lardcore” cuisine, a term coined by food writer Josh Ozersky to describe “Southern food with hardcore attitude.” Their leader is Charleston-based chef Sean Brock.
 
Esquire
Jun   4,  2013
Ask Eat Like a Man: Lardcore is Here to Stay
By Josh Ozersky at 12:31PM
Define lardcore for me again, please. Where’s the next great Bacon Explosion going to come from, and what form will it take?
Henry Tenney, Brooklyn
 
A two-parter! Bring it on, Henry! Lardcore, as I defined it a few years ago, describes a particular school of southern cookery characterized by an uninhibited, even ostentatious use of pork and pork fat. The best of these chefs, like Sean Brock and Donald Link, tended to use pork fat in a judicious but omnipresent way, as olive oil is used in the Mediterranean, or butter in Austria. In a larger sense, though, the term speaks to the defiant pride of the culture as a whole, and its unapologetic use of low-rent proteins like pork jowls and catfish. In coining the term, I was thinking of the way that contemporary music characterizes different schools, a la slowcore, grindcore, queercore, and etc. But more than that, its attitude reminded me of the old hardcore community, particularly Straight Edge, a subculture that was simultaneously pugnacious and puritanical in precisely the same way. Thank you for asking.