From rasher with love

Sizzling, crispy and irresistibly pork-scented bacon all starts with a well-reared traditional breed of pig and a slow, careful curing process.

- Tom Parker Bowles

AH, bacon. Breakfast behemoth, saviour of the sandwich and the frying pan’s erstwhile friend. Who can resist that pork-scented siren call, an olfactory allurement so seductive that it turns taste buds tumescent and vegetarian virtue the way of all flesh? When a man is tired of bacon, as Samuel Johnson almost said, he is also tired of life.

Gloriously democratic, bacon cares little for class, cash or snobbery, devoured on Formica-topped tables and solid silver platters alike. It pays no heed to the bourgeois strictures of formal eating, either. A predawn snack and a feast before bed, crowning a burger, buried in burrito, slow-cooked with cabbage, sprinkled into salad or even slipped into fudge. ‘Landlord, bring us beans and bacon and a bottle of your finest Burgundy,’ cries some jolly character in the pages of G. K. Chesterton. Good bacon will never let you down.

And that’s the point. Just as with sausages, their blessed brethren, quality is all. At its best, all crisp-edged fat, sweet succour and gentle smoke, it’s one of the pinnacles of the meat curer’s art. At its worst, made with wretched, intensively farmed pigs, injected with brine and slathered with chemical ‘smoke’, it’s a scum-coated travesty of bitter despair.