To have been bereft of ‘real’ bacon for neigh-on seven years was a great hardship. I was born and brought up as an Englishman; the consumption of bacon, and all things porcine, was second nature to me. The absence of pork products, and in particular – bacon, in my life for those oh so many lean years was poignantly noticeable. That lack became somewhat burdensome to me, in the hot and humid equatorial country where I had chosen to end my days.
Beef bacon, chicken bacon and all other forms of meat ‘bacon’, which does not derive from a porcine source, is not bacon. Bacon is, at its most simplest – pig meat cured with salt, and that is the most important part – it is meat from a pig. Bacon comes from a pig, it is pig meat, it is not, repeat not, from any other animal except from a pig. It is porcine. Beef or chicken bacon just is not bacon; it is a gross misunderstanding of English terminology and a cunningly mischievous word play on behalf of some. Bacon, or so we are led to believe from internet sources, has been with us since Roman times. Bacon is thin slices of pig meat that is boiled, salted or smoked to produce a most distinctive flavour – that of deliciously cooked pig.
In my seven-year forced abstinence, I constantly daydreamed of bacon sandwiches. Bacon sandwiches had been my saviour as a small boy. In the late afternoon, I would traipse back from my almost entirely hateful secondary school, dragging my education weary feet up the formerly Anglo-Saxon hill and through the Norman Castle Park, to reach the town bus station. As I sauntered, my recurrent youthful fantasies included a drive-by featuring the mythically marvellous Boudicca, knives on her whirling chariot wheels, ploughing through the school bullies who were always making my life hell. Those fantasies tended to dissipate as I crossed the road by the war memorial, and caught an imagined scent of bacon sandwiches.
In the bus station cafe, fronted by the monthly American comic book display, lurked the most delicious of sumptuous repasts – those inequitable bacon sandwiches. Those truly divine sandwiches were sodden with greasy bacon fat, and stuffed with mouth-watering rashers of fried streaky bacon. The small boy that I was could only enhance that bacon loveliness with Heinz Tomato Sauce – none other condiment would do. I was proud to have that sauce, and accompanying bacon fat, dribble down my young chin – it was a coming of age, an initiation into adulthood. Bacon sandwiches were my liberator then, as now. I saved my school lunch money, went hungry all afternoon, and denied myself the pleasure of a comic or two, just to be able to delight in bacon sandwiches at that old Roman town, bus station cafe. It was a small piece of heaven.
The country in which I had found myself, reduced the grand notion of cured porcine bands to thin strips of beef, which could have be mistaken for leather....I continue to have doubts along those lines. There is simply no comparison between what is so loosely called beef bacon, and the real, genuine article – bacon from a pig. The name ‘bacon’ is most misleading. It was not until I had once holidayed in that sunny clime - where three predominant cultures try to avoid rubbing shoulders with each other, that I ‘discovered’ the entity known as ‘beef bacon’. It was a severe culture shock.
There were two ribbons of a dark brown substance lying on my hotel breakfast plate. I prodded them, half expecting them to shuffle off the plate, slither across the table and plop onto the floor. They didn’t. I poked those two objects sniffily, then slashed my yellow egg yolks (with apologies to Buñuel and Dali), and let them bleed across those odd objects. I punctured and cut those brown strips, dowsed them in yolk and eased then into a position commensurate with chewing. They would not be chewed. I tried harder and eventually evacuated them from my oral orifice, much to the disgust of my travelling companion. I discovered later that those two dark brown objects were called, laughingly – beef bacon. During the years that followed, I abstained from the travesty that was beef bacon, and later – in the company of people of certain religious convictions, abstained from real bacon too. After my epiphany and resurrection, I rushed headlong to Tesco – cornucopia land of wines, spirits et al, and purchased rashers of what was to be the most delicious bacon I had ever tasted. It was delicious because of the seven-year denial.
In days off from work and writing, I actively seek venues where bacon may be consumed, despite the creeping religious limitations of the beautiful country in which I now reside.
