WHAT IS BACON?

Food historians tell us human consumption of pork is ancient. So is cured (smoked, salted, dried) pork. Notes here:

"Bacon. The side of a pig cured with salt in a single piece. The word originally meant pork of any type, fresh or cured, but this older usage had died out by the 17th century. Bacon, in the modern sense, is peculiarly a product fo the British Isles, or is produced abroad to British methods...Preserved pork, including sides salted to make bacon, held a place of primary importance in the British diet in past centuries....British pigs for both fresh and salted meat had been much improved in the 18th century. The first large-scale bacon curing business was set up in the 1770s by John Harris in Wiltshire...Wiltshire remains the main bacon-producing area of Britain..."

(In "Oxford Companion to Food", Alan Davidson, Oxford University Press,Oxford, 1999, p. 47)

"Bacon. Etymologically, bacon means meat from the 'back of an animal'. The word appears to come from a prehistoric Germanic base *bak-, which was also the source of English back. Germanic bakkon passed into Frankish bako, whcih French borrowed as bacon. English acquired the word in the twelfth century, and seems at first to have used it as a synonym for the native term flitch, 'side of cured pig meat'. By the fourteenth century, however, we find it being applied to the cured meat itself..."

(In "An A-Z of Food and Drink", John Ayto,Oxford University Press,Oxford, 2002, p. 14-15)

"Hams and bacon were either dry-salted or barrelled in their own brine. The Romans recognized ham (perna) and shoulder bacon (petaso) as two separate meats, and different recipes for preparing them for the table. According to Apicius both were to be first boiled with dried figs, but ham could then be baked in a flour with paste, while bacon was to be browned and served with a wine and pepper sauce...Bacon fat or lard was in particular favour among the Anglo-Saxons who used it for cooking and also as a dressing for vegetables...[Medieval] Country folk ate their bacon with pease or bean pottage or with 'joutes'."

(In "Food and Drink in Britain: From the "Stone Age to the 19th Century", C. Anne Wilson, Academy Chicago, Chicago, 1991, p. 74, 77 & 88)

"...the most important products from the pig were bacon and ham. Once the pig was ready to be butchered, the tueur skillfully cut the larger joints to be put aside for salting, or more commmonly in France, drying into hams and sides of "lard" (bacon). Bacon was the cheapest, most popular pork product, and a mainstay of the European peasant diet for centuries. William Ellis, one of many sixteenth and seventeeth-century English rural gentlemen who produced books on agricultural and domestic improvements, wrote in 1750 that "Where there is Bread and Bacon enough, there is no Want....

In the Northern Parts of England, thousands of families eat little other Meat than Bacon; and indeed, in the southern parts, more than ever live on Bacon, or Pickled Pork." Some flitches of bacon were salted and then plain dried while the best bacon was hung in the chimney breast to smoke. Sliced bacon collops were a special English cut of bacon that was fried with eggs, the forerunner of our "greasy breakfasts" of bacon and eggs. In the past, as we have seen, most home-cured bacon was cooked into a pease or bean pottage. Commercial bacon production was started as early as 1770, when it is said that John Harris of Clane in Wiltshire, watching pigs resting there on their way from Ireland to London, had the idea of curing them on the spot. Special huge, fat bacon pigs, were bred to be killed at any time of year. The meat was cured quickly, and meant that it tainted quickly as well. As the quality was not so good, this bacon was sold quickly and cheaply to the poor in country markets. In spite of this, William Ellis considered bacon to be a "seviceable, palatable, profitable, and clean meat, for ready Use in a Country house;..."

Bacon could also be spiced. A recipe from 1864, in "The Art and Mystery of Curing, Preserving, and Potting all kinds of Meats, Game and Fish by a Wholesale Curer of Comestibles", for "superior spiced bacon," suggested taking some pieces of pork "suitable for your salting tub," rubbing them well with warmed treacle, and adding salt, saltpeter, ground allspice, and pepper, rubbing and turning them every day for a week. The meat was then suspended in a current of air and later coated with bran or pollard and smoked."

(In "Pickled, Potted and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World", Sue Shephard,Simon and Schuster,New York,2000, p. 68-69)

From http://www.foodtimeline.org/, digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa