3. Cutting across political and ethnic boundaries
The love of olive oil and bacon doesn't stop at geopolitical boundaries. Olive trees have outlasted empires (Greeks, Turks, Byzantines and Ottomans). Their fruit and its essence have been common to cuisines of peoples that have been enemies for ages (Greeks and Turks, Israelis and Palestinians), as well as the cookery of regions like Provence that have been dragged back and forth among sovereign states (France, Italy and later France again).
In studying traditional American cooking it's increasingly clear to me that bacon could be our single most historically important ingredient. Like olive oil, which serves as a culinary thread (maybe rope would be a better metaphor) binding together the varied cuisines of the Mediterranean, bacon is the common ingredient of nearly every element of regional American cooking. Anywhere you go they use it, and typically in profusion. You'll certainly find it all over the South, but the Union Army counted on it heavily during the Civil War, too.
Bacon has always been big in New England: with clams in chowder, with beans for baking, with eggs for breakfast, for sautéing scallops and dozens of other old-time dishes. The Pennsylvania Dutch use a lot of it in eggs and plenty more in potato salads. And Frederick Law Olmstead wrote in 1856 that, "The universal food of the people of Texas, both rich and poor, seems to be corn-dodgers and fried bacon." Out West I've had bacon with fish and in salads and on sandwiches. And of course north of the border Canadians have loved their unique form of bacon for a long time.
Although it wasn't part of their pre-Columbian cooking tradition, many Native Americans have been using bacon for centuries. Bacon with wild rice is definitely a staple: the fact that bacon came to be so closely connected to — and so often cooked with — the most highly valued and esteemed food among the Native American cultures of the Upper Midwest speaks volumes to its culinary value.
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4. The fat is where the flavor is
I learned long ago that if you want to replicate the traditional flavors of any cuisine you always start by using the right fat. Just like olive oil is the flavor underlying so much Mediterranean food, bacon quietly but forcefully buttresses the flavors of food all over this country. I can't even think of how many folks have told me that adding a bit of bacon fat to whatever they're cooking makes all the difference.
John T. Edge, writer, culinary historian and cultural commentator par excellence, who grew up in Georgia, told me that his mother always kept a Dundee jam jar of the stuff next to the stove. "She started every dish with a glug of bacon fat," he said. Down in Atlanta, award-winning chef Scott Peacock cooks his famous fried chicken in bacon fat. Food writer Francine Maroukian calls fat from really good bacon "a secret weapon in the kitchen. Just a few tablespoons will lend its smoky depth and salty twist to anything you cook." Gives me mental images of little bacon-tipped missiles fired out of under-counter silos toward stovetops all over the country. Which I guess would require Weight Watchers World Headquarters to respond with some sort of ABBM (Anti-Bacon Ballistic Missile).
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5. Big flavor return for a small investment
As with olive oil, the flavor bacon brings to the table far exceeds its volumetric contribution. In other words, when you look at the ingredients for a recipe you'll rarely see either olive oil or bacon called for in particularly large quantity. But when you use them well, each makes an enormous difference in the flavor of the finished dish. Literally an ounce or so of bacon can make up half the flavor of a fantastic, easy-to-prepare dish.
In this sense I've become a bigger and bigger believer that bacon's biggest value in the kitchen isn't in its obvious uses, sliced for breakfast or BLTs (though those are great, too), but rather when it's chopped or diced and used as a seasoning. A bit of bacon goes a long way with cooked vegetables, just as olive oil does in Greek cuisine. Through slow-cooking the fat is absorbed into the produce, leaving a rich, full-flavored vegetable dish.
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6. Year-round cooking
It's become much more commonplace in recent years to eat fresh foods when they're in season. But, while the flavor of both oil and bacon will vary a little from one time of the year to another (oil more so than bacon), both are really anything but seasonal. Each certainly has a season in which they were traditionally produced, but both were "designed" for relatively long storage and year-round use. And because both have long shelf lives they've become staples that cooks count on in all seasons, and in good economic times or bad.
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7. Everyone eats it
Unlike some foods, which are eaten — or, were eaten at one time — only by particular social classes, both bacon and olive oil seem to be universally loved. While the wealthy may have had more of either, neither was ever produced only for rich people. Other than the obvious exception of observant Jews, Muslims and vegetarians, bacon is big with everyone — urban and rural, black and white, old and young. While they haven't added it as a question to the census yet, statistics indicate that over half of American households have bacon on hand at all times!
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8. Different bacons for different dishes
Just as one would want to select an appropriate olive oil to use in a particular recipe (say, a big green oil with meat versus a soft elegant one for delicate fish), so, too, would I want to have more than one bacon on hand for cooking. Different dishes demand different levels of flavor intensity and smoke, and I want to be able to choose my bacon accordingly. In fact, this is one of my big pushes for the next few years: to get folks to move past thinking simply that they "like bacon," to realizing that pairing the right bacon with the right application makes for even better eating. In fact, the more you love bacon, the more you owe it to your bacon-loving self to explore the various flavors and contributions that different varieties can make to your cooking and eating pleasure.
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9. Religion and politics
One place where I sort of struggled with testing the veracity of this "bacon as olive oil" theory was regarding the role that olive oil has in the spiritual history of the Mediterranean. Bacon just doesn't really play the kind of part in American religion that olives and olive oil do there. But then I came upon this quote from Joseph R. Conlin, who wrote about the Gold Rush-era West in Bacon, Beans and Galantines: "Then as now, most Americans probably preferred a good beefsteak on the table to any other viand. But pork was president of the Republic."
It immediately struck me that I had been looking for the analogy in the wrong place. Politics is the true American religion. So whereas in Athens and Rome olive oil was connected to the gods, bacon in America took on the role of a duly-elected officer of state. As a writer in the nineteenth-century Godey's Lady's Book puts it: "The United States of America might properly be called the great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom."
Maybe we should drop the bald eagle and replace it with a hog? Or maybe it's time to move past a "chicken in every pot" to "bacon in every skillet!"
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10. The Tree Connection
There is actually a tenth way that olive oil and bacon are comparable. It's the tree connection. This was the toughest of the ten things on this list to work out. I mean, olives clearly grow on trees, but even city kids know that pigs don't. Or do they? One day I realized that there was a tree connection to be made!
The story goes like this: back in the eighteenth century somewhere out west a group of American cavalry soldiers were lost in the wilderness. They were starving, no food for days. As they approached a small hill they happened on an old Jewish man resting in the shade. Barely able to walk, the soldiers straggled up to him and asked, desperately, if he knew where they could find something to eat. "Vell," he said, "I hoyd there vas a bacon tree up on the other side of the hill. But I'm not supposed to send you there." The soldiers got excited. A bacon tree? Just over the hill? What could be better? Despite the old man's warnings they set off over the hill, where they were immediately attacked by a group of bandits. All the soldiers were killed except for the captain, who crawled back to where the old man was sitting. "Oy vey, vat happened?" the old man asked. The captain gasped out his story. "Why didn't you warn us?" he wailed. "Vait a minute," said the Jewish fellow. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his Yiddish-English dictionary and started flipping through the pages. Suddenly he stopped and slapped his head. "Oy!" he said, "I feel terrible! It vasn't a 'bacon tree.' It vaz a 'ham-bush!'"
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