98 Fun Facts About Bacon

American-style 'streaky' bacon comes from which part of the pig?

The belly is so central to bacon that US rules reserve the plain word for it: bacon cut from any other part of the pig has to name that part on the label.

Which cut does British back bacon include that streaky bacon does not?

The loin is the lean muscle that also gives pork chops, which is why a British slice eats more like a ham steak than a fatty American strip.

Which kind of bacon, in American usage, is the lean, round slice often served on eggs Benedict?

Canadian is a name used only south of the border: in Canada the cut carries no nationality at all, and the plain word 'bacon' means the same streaky strips Americans fry.

Ontario's peameal bacon is rolled in what?

Cornmeal later took over from the ground yellow peas that gave peameal bacon its name; the peas were first packed around the cured pork to help it keep.

Guanciale, the Italian cured meat used in carbonara, is made from which part of the pig?

The jowl gives guanciale its name, from guancia, Italian for cheek; cooks melt its fat out in the pan, and that fat is what flavours the sauce.

Which Italian cousin of bacon is usually left unsmoked and often sold rolled?

Pancetta is cured with spices and then air-dried, so its strong flavour comes from the seasoning and the drying rather than from wood smoke.

Which part of the pig, also slow-smoked for pulled pork, is cured to make cottage bacon?

The boneless shoulder, which butchers call pork butt, is leaner and much cheaper than the usual bacon cut, which is why home curers like it; the result is also sold as buckboard bacon.

From which part of the pig is British 'collar bacon' taken?

Near the head: collar is the neck, a slightly fatty and relatively cheap cut that does not dry out, which makes it a good choice for long, gentle cooking.

Bacon is either wet-cured or dry-cured, meaning the pork is preserved by which two methods?

Brining and salting are the wet and dry cures: most mass-produced bacon is pumped with brine because that takes hours, while a rubbed-on dry cure can be left to hang for up to two weeks.

Publicist Edward Bernays drew on his famous uncle's psychological theories to sell Americans on bacon and eggs; who was that uncle?

Sigmund Freud was Bernays's uncle, and the nephew used his ideas to promote sales of bacon, persuading a country that breakfasted on toast and coffee that a hearty plate was the healthier start.

Curing salt for bacon and ham is dyed which colour so that cooks cannot mistake it for table salt?

Pink is purely a warning: curing salt, often sold as Prague powder, is table salt mixed with sodium nitrite, and the meat's rosy colour comes from the nitrite reacting with the muscle, not from the dye.

USDA rules have long required bacon cured with celery-derived nitrites to carry which label?

Uncured is a legal fiction: the rules count only synthetic nitrite as a curing agent, so bacon cured with celery powder must also say 'no nitrites added', though the chemistry is the same.

Which French word names the small strips or cubes of fatty bacon fried for coq au vin and beef bourguignon?

Lardons do double duty in a French kitchen: the fat they give up is used to fry the rest of the dish, and the fried pieces are added again at the end as a garnish.

What colour name do British butchers give unsmoked bacon?

Green is used in its old sense of fresh or unprocessed, not for the colour of the meat; US meat inspectors still call the weight of fresh pork before curing its 'green weight'.

What do British cooks call a single thin slice of bacon?

Rasher has been the word since the 1590s and nobody is sure why; one guess is an old verb 'rash', meaning to cut.

What does the Proto-Germanic root of the word 'bacon' mean?

Back meat is the sense of the Germanic root *bakkon, kin to the word 'back', yet English did not inherit it directly: the word arrived through French in the 1300s.

Which English county gives its name to the bacon cure developed by the Harris family of butchers in Calne?

Wiltshire's cure owes its mildness to ice: the Harrises chilled their curing rooms with it, so the bacon needed far less salt than the hard-salted kind it replaced.

In Essex's Dunmow Flitch Trials, what must a married couple prove to win a side of bacon?

No regrets for a year and a day is the old oath: couples swear they have not wished themselves unmarried, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath was already joking about the Dunmow bacon in the 1300s.

Who sits on the jury at the modern Dunmow Flitch Trials?

Six maidens and six bachelors hear one counsel argue for the couple and another for the bacon; winners are carried through the town in a chair, and losers go home with a gammon.

Since the Second World War, how often have the Dunmow Flitch Trials normally been held?

Every leap year has been the rule since the war because, the organisers admit, four years gives them time to recover, though the run was broken when trials were staged in 2022 rather than 2020.

'Macon', promoted in wartime Britain as a substitute for scarce bacon, was made from which meat?

Mutton plus bacon gives the name; a Scottish MP pressed it on the wartime Ministry of Food, telling the Commons that any farmer's wife in Perthshire could show officials how to cure it.

Vegetarian bacon is often made from marinated strips of which fermented food?

Tempeh gets its bacon flavour from the marinade: the strips are soaked in seasonings such as liquid smoke, then fried or baked.

Imitation bacon bits, the kosher and vegetarian kind shaken over salads, are usually made from which crop?

Soybeans, processed into a textured protein and flavoured, make the imitation kind, so in the US it is inspected by the FDA while bits of real bacon answer to the USDA.

The WHO puts processed meats like bacon in its top cancer-evidence group, alongside which of these?

Tobacco smoking shares the group, but the label measures the strength of the evidence, not the danger: the agency put the added bowel-cancer risk at about 18% for each daily 50-gram serving.

In World War II, Americans saved bacon grease to be made into what?

Munitions makers needed glycerine for nitroglycerine, and it is a by-product of turning fat into soap, so butchers paid households for each pound of kitchen grease they handed in.

Which parasitic roundworm was the traditional reason bacon had to be treated or thoroughly cooked?

Trichinella larvae pass to anyone who eats infected meat undercooked, but farm rules have made pork a rare culprit in the US, where cases now usually trace to game such as bear and wild boar.

Which classic double-decker sandwich layers bacon with sliced chicken or turkey between three slices of toast?

Club sandwich recipes go back to the 1880s and perhaps to a New York gentlemen's club; the earliest known one, from 1889, had ham rather than bacon and only two slices of toast.

The Bacon Explosion, an internet-famous barbecue dish, is bacon wrapped around what?

Two pounds of sausage are rolled inside a woven mat of two pounds of bacon; posted online two days before Christmas 2008, the recipe was drawing tens of thousands of visitors by Christmas Day.

Which fast-food chain introduced the Baconator in 2007?

Wendy's launched the Baconator during a back-to-basics turnaround under a new chief executive, who told an interviewer she could manage just one in a sitting.

The Bacon Explosion, a viral 2008 recipe, was the work of competition barbecuers based where?

Kansas City barbecuers Jason Day and Aaron Chronister built it to answer a dare on Twitter; the finished roll packs at least 5,000 calories.

Which American salad combines bacon with chicken, hard-boiled egg, tomato and blue cheese?

Cobb salad is probably named after Robert Cobb, owner of Hollywood's Brown Derby restaurant, where it became a signature dish; stories differ on whether he or his chef first made it.

Which British chef made bacon-and-egg ice cream one of his signature dishes?

Heston Blumenthal got there by overcooking a custard until it nearly scrambled: the ice cream tasted so strongly of egg that he added smoked bacon to go with it.

Which low-carb eating plan is credited with helping to fuel America's bacon boom in the early 2000s?

Atkins cut out bread and pasta but promoted meat, cheese, eggs and other high-fat foods, so a plate of bacon counted as sticking to the diet.

Until 2011, traders on which city's Mercantile Exchange dealt in futures on frozen pork destined to become bacon?

Chicago's Mercantile Exchange launched the contract in 1961 so meat packers could hedge prices; the film Trading Places put it on screen, but year-round demand for bacon ended the need to stockpile frozen pork.

Leeds University scientists tested 700 versions of the bacon butty in 2007 and found which quality mattered most?

Crispiness, along with crunch, topped the list after 50 tasters and a texture-measuring machine had their say; the research was commissioned by Danish Bacon.

In Britain's long-running bacon butty debate, which condiment is the traditional rival to tomato ketchup?

Brown sauce against ketchup splits Britain so reliably that food writer Felicity Cloake named a book Red Sauce Brown Sauce, then admitted she likes mustard and marmalade best.

Which country's traditional boiled bacon and cabbage was swapped for corned beef by its emigrants in America?

Ireland's emigrants found that corned beef, a luxury back home, was cheap in American cities, where they bought it from Jewish butchers, and it took bacon's place in the pot.

What is a whole, unsliced side of bacon called?

Slab bacon is the form delis buy to slice to order, and US rules let it be sold part-cooked so long as the label says it still needs cooking.

Which German-language word for cured pork fat overlaps in meaning with 'bacon'?

Speck covers more ground than the English word: Germans call breakfast bacon Frühstücksspeck, while in Italy the name means a smoked ham from South Tyrol.

Under US food rules, ham must come from which part of the pig?

The hind portion alone qualifies: under US rules ham means the cured leg of pork, so cured cuts from the front of the pig, such as capocollo, cannot be sold under the name.

Which region of eastern France gives its name to the classic quiche studded with bacon?

Lorraine's signature dish has a German name at heart: 'quiche' is traced to a dialect form of Kuchen, the German word for cake.

Griebenschmalz, a German spread studded with bacon pieces, is mostly what?

Rendered fat is what Schmalz means in German, whatever the animal; English took the word from Yiddish, so there schmaltz means chicken fat from the kosher kitchen instead.

Which city is nicknamed 'Hogtown', a name said to come from the pork and bacon packed there by the William Davies Company?

Toronto's William Davies Company, the city's biggest pork packer, is also linked to peameal bacon, which by local tradition began when Davies packed cured pork in ground peas to ship to England.

Tatws Pum Munud, a traditional stew of potatoes, vegetables and smoked bacon, comes from where?

Wales knows it as 'five-minute potatoes'; everything is cut into slices so it lies flat in a large frying pan, and it is served on a plate with bread rather than in a bowl.

Which of these is added to bacon to greatly reduce the formation of nitrosamines?

Vitamin C, as ascorbate, uses up free nitrite before it can form nitrosamines in the frying pan; once USDA researchers showed this, US rules made it, or its close relative erythorbate, compulsory in pumped bacon.

Which shellfish is wrapped in bacon to make the savoury known as angels on horseback?

Oysters make the angels; swap in prunes or dates and the same bacon-wrapped bite becomes devils on horseback, a later spin-off that is often confused with the original.

Which 1824 Southern cookbook, among America's earliest, takes it for granted that bacon is always smoked?

The Virginia Housewife grew out of a Richmond boarding house that Mary Randolph opened after her husband lost his federal post; it was reprinted at least nineteen times before the Civil War.

Which 1708 satire of colonial Maryland grumbles about hominy stuffed with fried bacon fat?

The Sot-Weed Factor follows a merchant who sails out to trade in the colony's cash crop, is swindled by a crooked lawyer and leaves in disgust; John Barth borrowed Ebenezer Cooke's title for a 1960 novel.

Which singer made a toasted peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich famous as his favourite snack?

Elvis Presley loved the combination so publicly that menus now list it simply as 'the Elvis', sometimes with honey or jelly added.

Which astronaut shared the first meal eaten on the Moon, bacon squares included, with Neil Armstrong?

Buzz Aldrin and Armstrong ate bacon squares and peaches, washed down with coffee, in the lunar module soon after landing, while Michael Collins stayed in orbit.

The BLT sandwich took off after World War II thanks to the spread of which kind of store?

Supermarkets spread fast after the war and stocked the sandwich's ingredients all year round, which turned it into an everyday order.

Which chain's Double Down swapped the bun for two fried chicken fillets around bacon and cheese?

KFC adapts its bunless sandwich for halal menus abroad, where the bacon gives way to turkey bacon, smoked chicken or even hash browns.

In Britain, what are the small bacon-wrapped sausages served beside the Christmas turkey called?

Pigs in blankets are chipolatas wrapped in streaky bacon, unlike the American dish of almost the same name, which wraps its sausage in bread or pastry dough.

Beggin' Strips, a Purina snack made to resemble strips of bacon, is a treat for which animal?

Dogs are the customers: the bag shows a cartoon hound licking his chops, a mascot created in 1994 and given the fitting name Hamlet.

Smithfield Foods, Virginia's pork and bacon giant, was bought in 2013 by a firm from which country?

China's Shuanghui, now called WH Group, paid $4.72 billion for Smithfield, at the time the largest Chinese takeover of an American company.

The Sonoran hot dog, wrapped in bacon and piled with pinto beans, takes its name from a state in which country?

Mexico's state of Sonora gave the snack its name: it began at street carts in the capital, Hermosillo, then crossed the border to become a favourite in Tucson, Arizona.

The phrase 'bring home the bacon' first became widely used in newspaper reports on which sport?

Boxing made the phrase famous: before Joe Gans's 1906 lightweight title fight, his mother wired him to bring home the bacon, and sportswriters ran with it.

Which Midwestern state, where hogs far outnumber people, holds the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival each year?

Iowa has more than seven hogs for every resident, and its bacon festival in Des Moines sold just 200 tickets when it began in 2008.

Which chain's franchisee Herb Peterson invented a breakfast sandwich of egg, cheese and lean back bacon in 1972?

McDonald's gained the Egg McMuffin, which Peterson modelled on eggs Benedict and served on a toasted, buttered English muffin.

Which tender beef steak is so mild in flavour that chefs often wrap it in bacon before cooking?

Filet mignon is cut from the small end of the tenderloin, and in France the same name usually means pork or veal rather than beef.

Hoppin' John, a Southern rice dish cooked with bacon and eaten for luck at New Year, features which legume?

Black-eyed peas carry the luck: one custom has each diner leave three on the plate so the year brings luck, fortune and romance.

Which hardwood, a classic for smoking American bacon, also gave President Andrew Jackson his 'Old' nickname?

Hickory smoke is one of several American styles, alongside mesquite and applewood, and the cure is often sweetened with honey or molasses.

Rumaki, a tiki-bar appetiser once served at Trader Vic's, wraps bacon around water chestnuts and which meat?

Chicken liver and water chestnut are marinated in soy sauce before the bacon goes on, a favourite at Polynesian-themed restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Hot Brown, an open-faced turkey and bacon sandwich baked under Mornay, was created in which Kentucky city?

Louisville's Brown Hotel created it in 1926 as an alternative to late-night ham and eggs, when sliced roast turkey was a rarity saved for holidays.

Clams casino, clams baked on the half shell with breadcrumbs and bacon, originated in which US state?

Rhode Island menus list it almost everywhere; by legend a Narragansett casino's maître d' devised it in 1917 for a wealthy hostess.

Which drive-in chain is credited with the first bacon cheeseburger, added by a Michigan franchisee in 1963?

A&W credits Dale Mulder, who put it on his Lansing menu because one customer kept ordering bacon on his cheeseburger; Mulder later ran the whole company.

Which Montreal-born YouTube cooking show became famous for burying huge high-calorie dishes in strips of bacon?

Epic Meal Time began when a friend filmed host Harley Morenstein eating a hamburger stacked with six beef patties and eighteen strips of bacon.

Which soul singer is said to have given his first name to a bacon cheeseburger served between glazed doughnuts?

Luther Vandross is the namesake of the Luther Burger, by legend a favourite of his, which swaps the bun for one or more glazed doughnuts.

Which British Labour leader became an internet meme after a 2014 photograph of him eating a bacon sandwich?

Ed Miliband was snapped mid-bite while campaigning in the 2014 local elections, and the awkward picture drew sustained commentary for a year afterwards.

Which American city was long nicknamed 'Porkopolis' for the pork-packing trade that once dominated it?

Cincinnati marked its 1988 bicentennial with a park whose entrance is topped by winged pigs, and its yearly Flying Pig Marathon is named after them.

Bacon was among the first three foods rationed in wartime Britain, alongside butter and which other staple?

Sugar joined bacon and butter when rationing began on 8 January 1940, and shoppers had to register with a chosen shop and hand over coupons from a ration book.

Which British name is given to a leg of pork cured like bacon and sold raw, often roasted at Christmas?

Gammon is strictly the bottom end of a whole side of bacon, and unlike dry-cured hams such as prosciutto it must be cooked before it can be eaten.

What name is given to the strip of pig skin sometimes left along the edge of a slice of bacon?

Rind is the pig's skin, and it is less common on bacon in the English-speaking world, where most slices are sold with it already cut away.

Which cooking term means laying or wrapping strips of bacon over a lean roast such as pheasant or venison?

Barding lends a lean joint the fat it lacks while it cooks, and the layer of bacon also insulates and flavours the meat underneath.

Stegt flæsk, fried fatty pork in parsley sauce, sometimes translated as bacon, is which country's national dish?

Denmark's national dish uses pork that, unlike bacon, is never sold smoked and often not even salted, though older phrasebooks translate it as bacon.

Szalonna, smoked bacon fat roasted on a stick over a campfire, is a tradition of which country?

Hungary's campfire ritual is all about the drippings: the sizzling fat goes back and forth to the flames until the slice of bread is nearly soaked.

Tocino, the Spanish word for bacon, names a sweet cured breakfast pork in which Asian country?

The Philippines serves it as tosilog, a breakfast plate whose name blends tocino with the local words for garlic rice and egg.

Tartiflette, an Alpine bake of potatoes, onions and bacon from Savoy, is made with which French cheese?

Reblochon is the soft cheese at the heart of the dish, whose name probably comes from a local dialect word for potato.

Coddle, a one-pot dish of sausages, bacon, potatoes and onions, is most closely tied to which European capital?

Dublin coddle was reputedly a favourite of the playwright Seán O'Casey, and it turns up in the works of James Joyce.

Bacon Salt's makers funded their launch with $5,000 a founder's toddler had won on which TV show?

America's Funniest Home Videos paid out for a clip of three-year-old Dean Lefkow hitting his dad with a T-ball shot, and he lent the prize to the business.

Which seaweed made headlines in 2015 when Oregon researchers said their new strain tasted like bacon when fried?

Dulse, a red seaweed people have eaten for millennia, got its bacon moment when Oregon State professor Chris Langdon fried a strain he had patented.

Which yellow-flowered wild plant of the pea family goes by the folk name 'eggs and bacon'?

Bird's-foot trefoil earned the breakfast nickname from the yellow and orange of its flowers, while its usual name describes seed pods that splay like a bird's toes.

Which British corn snack, long sold under the Smith's name, is shaped and flavoured like a slice of bacon?

Frazzles are not sliced from anything: each strip is extruded corn starch, shaped and flavoured to pass for bacon.

Curing salts are added to bacon partly to stop the bacteria behind which rare but deadly form of food poisoning?

Botulism comes from a toxin made by Clostridium botulinum, whose growth nitrites hold back; it is rare, with only about 1,000 cases identified worldwide each year.

Which preservative, used to cure meats like bacon since medieval times, is also a main ingredient of gunpowder?

Saltpetre, the old name for potassium nitrate, reacts with the pigments in meat to give cured pork its lasting red colour.

Bryndzové halušky, potato dumplings with sheep's cheese and fried bacon bits, is a national dish of which country?

Slovakia's dumplings are boiled lumps of potato dough that look rather like gnocchi, with the smoked bacon scattered on top beside chives or spring onions.

Which American comedian counts bacon, cake and Hot Pockets among the subjects of his signature stand-up routines?

Jim Gaffigan built a clean, everyman act on food, and his Hot Pockets bit began with a commercial he mistook for a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Which book of the Hebrew Bible puts bacon off the kosher menu by declaring the pig an unclean animal?

Leviticus rules the pig out on a technicality: it has the split hoof that clean animals need, but it does not chew the cud.

Which chilli pepper is hollowed out, stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon to make 'armadillo eggs'?

Jalapeño poppers earn the armadillo name when a wrapping of bacon or sausage meat gives them the look of the animal's shell, a likely nod to Scotch eggs.

Which sticky dried fruit is traditionally pitted, stuffed and wrapped in bacon to make devils on horseback?

Dates are the traditional choice, though brandy-soaked prunes also appear, and the dish is probably named for being served devilishly hot.

The bacon, egg and cheese on a kaiser roll, known as a BEC, is a breakfast institution in which American city?

New York orders it so often that the words are run together into a single name, the baconeggandcheese.

Chicken fried bacon, battered strips served with cream gravy for dipping, was introduced in which US state?

Texas restaurateur Frank Sodolak of Snook says he invented it around 1991, though a 1954 Louisiana cookbook has a similar recipe made with salt pork.

In which country is bacon, pronounced 'bēkon', sold precooked with a ham-like texture instead of raw?

Japan sells its bacon processed and precooked, while fresh sliced pork known as bara is the popular choice for dishes cooked from raw.

Toucinho do céu, an almond dessert whose name means 'bacon from heaven', is a convent sweet from which country?

Portugal's convents made it one of many egg-rich sweets; it holds almonds and almost no flour, and it is said to be named for looking like bacon.

Flammekueche, a thin tart topped with crème fraîche, onions and bacon, is a speciality of which French region?

Alsace farmers who baked bread once a week used the thin tart to test the heat of their wood-fired ovens.

Which French city gives its name to a bistro salad of lettuce, bacon, croutons and a poached egg?

Lyon serves its salade lyonnaise in bouchons, the small traditional restaurants clustered around the city centre that pour the region's wines.

Speķrauši, crescent buns filled with chopped bacon and onions, are a festive staple of which Baltic country?

Latvia's families each guard their own recipe, but to earn the name the bun has to keep its crescent shape and its bacon filling.

The Mitch Morgan, a cocktail from a Colorado barbecue joint, garnishes a shot of which spirit with fried bacon?

Bourbon goes into a glass coated with a thin film of bacon grease, and the drink went on to inspire the seasoning Bacon Salt.