A whiff of cooked bacon makes we weak. The perfume of sizzling pork never fails to turn my head. It can even wake me from a nap.
Bacon has this power over other folks as well. Put a baking sheet loaded with strips of bacon under the broiler and members of your household, as well as any nearby mice, will show up in front of your stove. It you cook it, they will come.
Both the two-legged and four-legged creatures want the same thing, to eat the stuff that smells so good. I try to deal with all comers by feeding strips of cooked bacon to the humans, and by putting a piece of raw bacon rind in mousetraps. Bacon rind is, in my experience, a more effective mouse bait than peanut butter or cheese.
For eating I prefer husky bacon, the thick slices and slabs sold in butcher shops and some farmers' markets. But I won't turn down strips of the skinny supermarket bacon.
For a treat I recently ordered a $20, 2 1/2-pound slab of smoked bacon shipped from Roy L. Hoffman and Son Meats in Hagerstown. This is the body beautiful of bacon. It doesn't shrink when you cook it. The meat comes from select Maryland, grain-fed hogs. The smoke comes from white hickory. The procedure is supervised by the Hoffman family, whose members have been smoking meat in Western Maryland for more than 70 years.
Years ago, fall was the traditional season for bacon-making. With winter approaching, a farmer butchered his hogs and made bacon by slowly curing meat with salt, spices and wood smoke. Nowadays, most big meatpacking plants cure pork the year round by injecting the meat with solutions. This "wet curing" method produces bacon faster and less expensively than the old style, but it shrinks the meat.
Various groups have objections to eating the fatty meat of a pig, but I am not a member of these groups. I come from a long line of devoted bacon eaters. When, for instance, members of our clan gathered last summer at an ocean beach house, we spent many hours debating the question of how to make the perfect bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
As is true with most family discussions, there was little agreement in this one. On one side were the strict sandwich constructionists, who argued that only the ingredients that should be placed between two slices of mayonnaise-covered bread were those mentioned in the sandwich title. Namely bacon, lettuce and tomato.
Then there were the loose constructionists, who held that the sandwich could contain a variety of ingredients and still be considered a bona fide BLT.
