Bringing home the bacon

There’s an old Irish saying that “Nothing goes to waste in a house where a pig is kept”. I used to think it was meant to be taken literally until I realised that my wife was using the epithet to draw attention to my gargantuan appetite and my reputation as the ultimate omnivore. Nevertheless, there is a deal of truth in the old saw. What’s more, in olden times, there was no waste on a pig either, for our ancestors used everything but the grunt.
Descended from the wild boar, the pig is one of the world’s oldest forms of livestock, having been domesticated in China as early as 5000 BC. Pigs were mostly used for food at first, but people soon learned to fabricate their hides into shields and shoes, their bones into tools and weapons and their bristles into brushes. Pigs quickly began to play other valuable roles within the domestic economy: their feeding behaviour in searching for roots churned up the ground, making it easier to cultivate. Hypersensitive noses led pigs to truffles, an underground fungus much prized by humans even then. Pigs also ate waste vegetable matter and, by doing so, kept settlements sanitary and (relatively) odour free. A source of square meals; a facilitator of both war and art; an economic partner; a plough and a garbage truck, surely the pig, not the dog, is man’s best friend? So why do we treat our pal so shabbily?
One of the unquestioned paradoxes of our food culture today is that many of the very people who have (rightly) set their face against the purchase of a battery chicken or who spend afternoons writing to the Irish Times or The Guardian concerning the heinousness of Dutch veal production or the perceived evil of foie gras will own a freezer full of intensively-raised pork. The pig, an intelligent, gregarious creature deserves a better home than an overcrowded concrete pen where it is forced to wallow in its own muck. Pigs, like people, need their ‘space’.
Alas, such is the demand for pork, particularly in its cured form, bacon, that production has become a numbers game. Proprietary pig feeds often include growth promoters and antibiotics. Breeds are no longer selected for flavour, now size is the premier parameter – the more chops, the more profit. Fat, stigmatized by populist dieticians and editors of women’s magazines, has been exorcised, despite the fact that every good cook knows that fat means flavoursome, whether enfolding a joint or streaking a rasher.
The industry some years ago turned away from the traditional breeds of pig with their gorgeous names – the Large and Small Whites, the Gloucestershire Old Spot, the Saddleback, the Berkshire, The Tamworth and the Oxfordshire Sandy & Black, to name but a selection – preferring instead the long-backed (lots of chops!) Landrace and the heavyweight American-bred Duroc. Luckily, smaller breeders have kept the old timers alive. The Tamworth, in particular, is declared by its adherents to have the best flavour of all.
Much of the pork produced by intensive methods is only even barely palatable when cured. Here again, the industry has turned its back on trusted traditional methods of dray and wet salt curing, opting instead for curing the meat ‘instantly’ via a multi-needle injection of an artificially-flavoured and E-number laden brine cocktail, a doubly cynical exercise that both saves time and increases water content (and, hence, weight). Introduce rashers, cut from these joints, to heat and you don’t even need to taste them to discern the pathetic lack of quality. Examining the pool of water on the bottom of the grill pan will tell you all you need to know.
Proper dry-cured bacon is a delight. Salt, mixed with saltpetre which helps retain the pink colour, is simply rubbed onto the surface of the meat, which is then allowed to hang until ‘cured’. Ed Hick who, in Dun Laoghaire, makes some of Ireland’s finest pork sausage, has told me that he and other pork curers would like to dispense with saltpetre. However Ed doubted the market was yet ready for ‘grey bacon’. The custom of adding other ingredients such as sugar, honey or juniper berries to the curing mix can be traced back to Medieval times.
It’s a simple process. The enemy, so far as the big commercial operators are concerned, is, as always, the time it takes. Time costs money. So dry cured bacon has to be a premium product. We have to enjoy its flavour, respect its quality and fidelity and be prepared to pay a little extra for the privilege. Believe me, it’s worth making the choice and, when you smell the sizzling aroma, sense the crispness and savour the flavour of the rashers, you’ll know it too.
Jack McCarthy is a fifth-generation craft butcher, from Kanturk, County Cork who cures by employing traditional methods, both wet and dry. In 2006 he took Gold at The Great Taste Awards, considered the UK’s premier accolades for speciality food producers, for his spiced streaky bacon rashers. “This gave us real encouragement. It’s great to have the likes of Georgio Locatelli, Jean-Christophe Novelli, Glynn Christian and others enthusing about your product. The award definitely put us on the foodie map.
“I suppose, if you were to think deeply enough about it, our products are international. Most of the techniques we use were developed in France and Germany and then we give them an Irish twist. We have a couple of Polish lads working with us at the minute who have introduced cured and smoked meats from their own tradition. One of them has opened my eyes to some of the possibilities of smoking. He’s got us looking at cherry, beech and other woods. We’ve traditionally used oak but it does have a strong flavour that can sometimes overpower.
“We’ve worked with all sorts of pig. We are probably more interested in the quality, in the conditions in which it’s been kept than in the actual breed. We’ve made great bacon from Large White/Landrace crosses. At the moment we are bringing on some Duroc, a fabulous pig. The ones we buy are weaned and raised in the open, they’ve never seen the inside of a concrete pen. We’ve got the farmer to hang on to them a couple of weeks longer than the norm to get finer flavour.
“I like to innovate. We’ve developed a great sausage using our smoky bacon and Mary Burns’ wonderful Ardrahan cheese. They are selling very well in the shop. The Kanturk shop is still our main outlet but we are also in speciality shops and some markets. Joyces (the niche supermarket group) in Galway take our products too.
“We don’t work in isolation. We go to the shows and competitions and talk to other craft butchers like James McGeough of Oughterard who is doing wonderful things with his smoked Connemara lamb. We also work with restaurateurs to develop new products. Mercy Fenton of Jacobs on The Mall in Cork city, in particular, has been a great help. As a response to enquiries from the restaurant trade we’ve produced an air-dried pancetta and it’s been received very well. One or two restaurateurs had started experimenting off their own bat, without too much success. With our dry-cured bacon we work with six different spices and we are currently testing smoked middle, which should be interesting.
In West Cork, Fingal Ferguson,son of Tom and Giana of Gubbeen cheese fame has a wealth of cured and smoked meat products that includes salamis and continental-style sausages as well as hams and bacon. The proud boast is that they are ‘handmade, using only quality ingredients time and care.” Note that word ‘time’ again! The Gubbeen Smokehouse products are available in speciality shops and good delis nationwide, as well as certain farmers’ markets which Fingal himself attends.
Up in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Pat O’Doherty produces his famous ‘black bacon’, which was simply sold in his family’s butcher’s shop until the winning of one of the prestigious Irish Food Writers Guild Award in 2000 brought it to the attention of a wider audience. Pat’s recipe for success was founded on buying carefully selected animals from farmers who rear the right pigs in the right way, curing the pork in the traditional way using natural ingredients (and secret flavourings to add some mystique) and then dry curing in temperature controlled conditions for up to three three months. There is also an oak smoked variant, aimed at reproducing the flavours known to our ancestors who matured their cured bacon by hanging it in the chimney breast.
These ancestors knew a thing or two. The worldwide renown of the ‘full Irish breakfast’ and the ‘Ulster fry’ was built on bacon such as this. Reincarnated, I reckon our forefathers would look askance at the lachrymose rashers sold in the average supermarket nowadays. And so should we.

This article first appeared in Intermezzo Magazine Issue 2