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Choice Breakeast Bacon

A cured and smoked pork bacon prepared with salt, sugar, spices, and peat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and shallot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,316 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Choice Breakeast Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Rub both sides of the pork with coarse sea salt, sugar, shallots, saltpetre, salt prunelle, and bay leaves.

  2. Let it cure for a week, turning it every other day.

  3. After a week, add common salt and treacle, rubbing it in daily for another week.

  4. For the next week, baste and turn the meat only.

Dry and smoke

  1. After three weeks, dry the meat with coarse cloths.

  2. Rub the meat all over with a mixture of equal parts pea meal and bran.

  3. Hang the meat to be smoked with oak lops or sawdust mixed with dried fern and peat.

Store

  1. Store in a ham and bacon chest, embedded in malt coom and pulverized charcoal for three months or longer.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pork + shallottop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Sugar + shallottop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Pork + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,579 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork
Forms the meat that the cure penetrates and firms as it is cured and smoked.
Common salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the meat during the long cure.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives it a pink cured colour.
Treacle
Adds sweetness and a deep colour to the cure.
Coarse sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.
Bay leaves
Adds a gentle aromatic flavour to the cure.

The step that matters

Rubbing the cure in daily during the second week. Salt draws moisture out of meat and dissolves into it slowly; uneven or skipped rubbing lets the cure penetrate unevenly and can leave spoilage-prone areas under-salted.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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