Thompson - Bacon

It calls you from a sound sleep. Oh my goodness, what it can do for a pot of peas. We dont think of it as the star, but it is always more than a supporting character. Folks gussie it up in ice cream and chocolate, yet its humble place in the world is always preserved. We have loved it since we were kids. Its been the downfall of many a vegetarian. No cardiologist can take it away, at least not completely. In the South, it sustains us with simple memories and everyday joys from an animal thats easy to raise. Bacon: it seasons our life.

Why? Bacon is meat candy, thats why. Eating bacon is what we do in the South, and, paraphrasing Rhett Butler, we dont give a damn if its stylish or not. It allows every sense to take part in its pleasureour ears with its gentle popping as it fries, the fragrance that is always recognizable, the eyes as we ponder the perfect match of fat to lean, and of course our taste, as bacon hits the salty, sweet, textural, and umami receptors of our tongues. Nothing else in the food world can amuse all of the sensory points the way bacon does.

And while it may be all those things, it is also a sustaining food. Bacon reveals to us history, both our own and our beloved Souths. Bacon is democratic. Most anyone in our population can afford some kind of bacon. While most of the major meatpacking companies have fiddled with it some, they have been unable to destroy the essential truth in bacon. Even in the face of the mega-industrial food landscape, smaller packers offering artisanal bacons have found their place on the grocers meat counter.

Bacon is, by definition, a cured and sometimes smoked pork part. Curing pork has a long history, probably dating back to early Chinese dynasties. Bacon, the noun, is a bit French and German and traditionally refers more to the back of the hog, and the British may have been the first to consider, and cure, a piece of pork called bacon. Bacon is cured with salt, sugar, and other flavorings, either rubbed into the pork using a method called dry packing, or cured wet, in brine. In large operations, the meat may be injected with the brine. The result is fresh bacon, or green bacon. This bacon can be smoked, fried, grilled, baked, or boiled. Most bacon in America is smoked before being sold to the end consumer. The smoke is what gives bacon its unique appeal, and it is also where bacons differentiate themselves from one another. The smoke can be wafted from smoldering corncobs, hickory, applewood, cherry, or most any other wood.

In America, bacon comes from the belly of the pig. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines bacon as the cured belly of a swine carcass. We seem to like the higher fat-to-lean ratio from the belly. The rest of the world considers this American-style bacon, or streaky bacon. People from most other countries tend to prefer their bacon from the meatier, leaner side portions of the hog, such as the lointhis type is often called back bacon. Canadian and Irish bacon is an example of this style. Italys pancetta is cured and rolled but never smoked.

More than fifty different styles of bacon happily coexist worldwide. Todays U.S. markets contain many of the worlds bacons. As the Latino population has grown in the States, and in the South especially, it has become more common to see jowl or cheek bacon in many markets and other stores that serve a large Latino clientele. This usually is sold under the name guanciale. Bacon can also be made from beef, goat, lamb, and especially turkey, and while these preparations conform to many religious or health dietary concerns, this is not bacon and cannot be labeled as such, unless the source of the meat is defined (beef bacon, for example).

Bacon, as a meat that rides low on the hog, belongs to the iconic three Ms of traditional southern foodways, as Marcie Cohen Ferris discusses in her book The Edible South. Those Ms are meal (wheat flour and cornmeal), meat, and molasses. These ingredients became crucial, but nutritionally inadequate, foods of the southern working-class table, Marcie comments. As a cheap, filling food, bacon reflects the complexity of southern history and southern cuisine, in which it was an important food for enslaved African Americans in the plantation South and equally important for white folks in the mountain South as well as the fifty-acre farmers and sharecroppers in the regions larger environs. As with a number of foods traditionally eaten by poor people, bacon has now been enthusiastically embraced by many leading figures in the Souths contemporary food renaissance. The Southern Foodways Alliance featured a bacon forest at one of its recent symposiums, and many southern chefs, male and female, pray at the church of bacon. But bacon will still be a part of the southern culinary fabric long after the bacon silliness is over.

The economics of bacon are clear in our southern heritage. The pig has been a critical piece of the survival puzzle from the earliest days for European settlers who came to call the South home. The first porcine inhabitants of the South were introduced in Florida by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in the 1530s. Historian Charles Reagan Wilson, in volume 7 of