What is the Perfect Bacon Sandwich?

Its origins, delights and dangers

Francis Bacon — Inventor of the bacon sandwich

The bacon sandwich. What better way to bless your mouth than with a bacon butty? A simple yet beautiful symphony of meat, bread and sauce. I wonder how one could live without having experienced such a heavenly sandwich. But I did. For a time.

Not many people remember the first time they tried a bacon butty, but I do. I was born in Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong you have to go out of your way to get a good piece of bacon, and I mean proper bacon. None of that streaky crap, or the lean cuts that are closer to ham.

It wasn’t a matter of availability. There’s plenty of pork around. In fact, the Chinese have one of the highest rates of pork consumption in the world. It was, and in my opinion still is, hard to get your hands on good bacon.

Kevin Bacon — great great grand nephew of Francis Bacon

I can’t remember how old I was exactly, but I was definitely in single digits when my father realised I had never experienced a proper bacon sandwich. So instead of doing my maths homework, we went on a quest for the perfect bacon sarnie.

He decided to call in an expert. An English friend of his, a Cockney by the name of ‘Bookie’. For those of you not familiar with the term, a Cockney is by definition an East London native with an incredibly unique accent and a penchant for eating jellied eels. Sadly their kind are in decline. If you would like to learn more about Cockneys, I suggest you see a documentary that details their history and customs, called ‘EastEnders’.

So there I was, a young Hong Kong boy, face to face with a real life Cockney. “Ello mate! Ow ’re you? Me name is Bookie, noice to meat ya.” I think I hid behind my father’s legs during our first encounter.

So after a little chit chat, we began to talk about the serious nature of sarnies. This is the recipe he recounted to me that day.

Bookie’s Bacon Butty

Ingredients:

• Smoked thick-cut Bacon
• White Bread (Warburtons preferably)
• Butter
• HP Sauce

Method:

1. Grill or fry the bacon for 2–3 mins each side. (You want to make sure the fat is properly rendered, but not so much that it becomes too crispy.)
2. Take two slices of white bread and leave it untoasted.
3. Butter both slices of bread.(Can prove difficult if butter is too cold)
4. Place bacon on bread and smother in HP sauce.
5. Cap it and eat it.

Simple, but incredibly satisfying. The soft bread gives way to the taut delectable bacon, which by now is dripping with butter. Just as you think it can’t get any better, your tongue begins to tingle. The sauce has arrived. That subtle yet spicy sting cuts through the grease and reminds you that there is indeed a god. Yes, in my eyes, HP, bacon, butter and bread is the perfect combination.

But here’s where things get controversial. What is the perfect bacon butty? Good ol’ Bookie swore by this recipe, but the fact remains it changes from region to region. Some people prefer Ketchup over Brown, some prefer toasted to untoasted, and others, margarine over butter. This simple sandwich has divided the British nation, if not the world.

So I decided to do some research and stumbled across this interesting infographic.

Here, you can see a clear divide. It’s as if someone drew a line directly from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. People living on this longitude seem to worship brown sauce. Yet on either side of that line, are ketchup lovers.

How is this possible? What geographical or anthropological reasoning could explain this phenomena?

It’s a well know fact that people from the UK are prone to debate when it comes to food or drink. Everyone knows that.

But did you know that 83 per cent of all violence in the UK is attributed to culinary disputes?

Could it have something to do with regional identity? I personally swear by HP sauce, so I found it strange that the Eastern counties went with Ketchup. Could it have something to do with politics, class, or even gender?

I did some sleuthing and it turns out there is no correlation whatsoever between politics and sauce preference. Strange.

But on a serious note, research has revealed that if you lack the skill to consume a simple bacon sarnie, your career prospects will inevitably suffer.

Exhibit A

Now let’s talk about the history of bacon. Where did it come from? What about the actual term ‘bacon’?

Well, according to a book entitled, An A-Z of Food and Drink by John Ayto, the word bacon originally meant ‘the back’.

“Bacon. Etymologically, bacon means meat from the ‘back of an animal’. The word appears to come from a prehistoric Germanic base *bak-, which was also the source of English back. Germanic bakkon passed into Frankish bako, which the French borrowed as bacon. English acquired the word in the 12th century, and seems at first to have used it as a synonym for the native term flitch, ‘side of cured pig meat’. By the 14th century, however, we find it being applied to the cured meat itself…”

The curing of meat has existed since time immemorial. Diodorus of Sicily wrote of how a tribe in Persia was known to salt their meat.

Even in Roman times, ham, and pork in general, was a staple, as made clear in Apicius — a collection of Roman recipes compiled during the 4th and 5th century AD.

(If you would like to know more about Roman cooking and recipes, check out this fantastic blog called Pass the Garum.)

But just because bacon has been around forever doesn’t mean it’s good for us. Recently, the WHO has claimed cured meats are carcinogenic, and to some extent, as harmful as tobacco. But how can this be?

Why is my bacon butty trying to kill me? Well it all boils down to nitrates. Sodium nitrates are traditionally used in the curing process, to make sure your ham, bacon or sausages aren’t harbouring any harmful bacteria. Under certain conditions, these nitrates can turn into cancer-causing molecules called nitrosamines. It is possible to cure meat without Nitrates, but you do run the slight risk of having botulism for breakfast.

The Perfect Bacon Sandwich — Best served with a cup of tea

So why all the doom and gloom? Well, seeing as bacon is now trying to kill us, we’re going to have to limit our intake. We must savour each and every bite. We can ill afford to squander our time on lesser sarnies. It’s our duty to discover the perfect bacon sandwich.

So what are your thoughts? Do you think Bookie’s recipe is perfect? Would you spend your precious bacon rations on it? If not, you’ve got some work to do.

Like and share if you agree, or comment below with a bacon rebuttal recipe. I am eager to taste your suggestions. And if you need something to wash it down with, check out this article on how to do the perfect strawpedo.