Skip to main content
Main

Super-excellent Bacon

A cured pork bacon prepared with saltpetre, brown sugar, sea salt, treacle, and optional pepper and juniper berries, then smoked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pork and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,121 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Super-excellent Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the pork

  1. Rub the pork with saltpetre and brown sugar, and let it sit for several hours.

  2. Cover the meat with the coarse sea salt and common salt mixture.

  3. After four days, add treacle and turn the hams daily, basting with the pickle for one month.

Dry and smoke

  1. Hang the hams to drain overnight, then wrap them in brown paper.

  2. Send the hams to be smoked for one month.

Add optional flavoring

  1. For extra flavor, rub the meat with black pepper and juniper berries before adding salt.

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 + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Sugar and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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, firms and sets as it dries and smokes.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured meat its characteristic pink color.
Brown sugar
Balances the salt and adds sweetness and depth to the cure.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, moisture and a dark, rich flavor to the pickle.

The step that matters

Turning the hams daily during the cure. Turning keeps the salt and pickle in even contact with all surfaces, so the cure penetrates evenly and no area is left under-salted or spoiled.

“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.

More bacon recipes

and Eggs 33Boiled 32Cured 32Omelette 12Curing 12Veal and Stew 11 See all 11 →

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes