Belly of the beast

So why do I cure my own bacon? Because it's fun, it's easy, and loving food is different than loving the food that you make.

Editor's note: The Discovery Channel has Shark Week. Here at Salon, we bring you Pork Week. This is the second in a weeklong series of stories about that most polarizing of meats. Read the first story here.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Animals, Cooking, Rebecca Traister, Life, Eat and Drink, Pork Week

July 8, 2008 | I was late for work this morning because I was making bacon. I don't mean the frying-it-up-in-a-pan kind of way. I don't mean in the broiling it kind of way. Or even the nuking it kind of way.

I mean that I was delayed because it had been two days since I had put my Red Wattle pig belly in its cure of salt and maple sugar, and that meant I had to turn it over in its pan and add the maple syrup.

These days, I cure my own meat. Well, to be fair, it's really my boyfriend, into whose apartment I have recently moved, who cures his own meats. His interest in this enterprise developed in the late fall, soon after I met him. Before me, there had also been an extensive flirtation with duck confit, a dalliance that explains the surprising number of duck carcasses in our freezer. But as our relationship heated up, so did his commitment to the saliferous preservation of meat -- specifically as pancetta (pig belly that has been cured with savory spices, rolled and air dried), guanciale (pork jowl similarly cured and hung to dry) and duck prosciutto (a magret of duck briefly salted and dried).

For most of this food foray, I merely looked on as he measured ingredients and hung the pastured, heritage-breed pork belly that he'd ordered from the Internet from the window of his Brooklyn apartment. I helped here and there: offering a pour of kosher salt, digging the brown sugar out of the cupboard, crushing some juniper berries under the flat, heavy blade of a knife, massaging the cure into the fatty crevices of the bellies, rinsing them and patting them dry before he expertly rolled and tied them.

But around the time we cured and hung our third pancetta, I was perusing Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's "Charcuterie," a book it's fair to say I never expected to curl up with. There, directly between "Hot-Smoked Duck Ham" and "Ham Hocks," I saw the recipe for maple-cured bacon. A week later, we had a heritage breed Berkshire pig belly, and it was I who was at the scale, a long stream of organic Grade A amber liquid hitting a bowl piled with salt and brown sugar.

In some ways, perhaps, this has been my destiny.

It's not like I was ever one of those New York women who store sweaters in their oven and don't know how to grill a chop. I love to eat, I love to cook, and I love to pack in the supplies for blizzards that will likely never come. My interest in food preparation was born long before I met my boyfriend, long before I ever heard of Alice Waters or Michael Pollan, and long before the pig-obsessed exertions of Mario Batali and Bill Buford changed the way we thought about salumi. I imagine I was set on this path on an evening sometime around 1978, when my father read these words to me: "That day Pa and Ma and Laura and Mary had fresh venison for dinner. It was so good that Laura wished they could eat it all. But most of the meat must be salted and smoked and packed away to be eaten in the winter.”

I hung on every line of Laura Ingalls Wilder's pioneer food porn: the way the little house in the big woods was stocked to bursting with enough smoked deer meat and yellow cheese and salted fish and pumpkins and squash and onions to feed a family of five (plus Jack the dog and Black Susan the cat) through the long cold Wisconsin winter.

In "Little House in the Big Woods," Pa also owned a pig. "It ran wild in the Big Woods, living on acorns and nuts and roots." Of course, the brief but happy life of Pa's pig was 130 years before localists, seasonalists and scientists would tout the possibility that pigs allowed to live and eat just like this might contain heart-healthy (if still mightily caloric) Omega-3 fats rather than just the artery-clogging stuff. The Ingalls' specimen of porcine perfection got slaughtered, boiled, scraped, gutted and hung to cool. "There were hams and shoulders, side meat and spare-ribs and belly. There was the heart and the liver and the tongue, and the head to be made into headcheese, and the dish-pan full of bits to be made into sausage." Every morsel of meat was sprinkled with salt, the hams and shoulders put into pickling brine and then smoked, the lard cooked and stored, the cracklings used to flavor johnnycake, the skinned tail roasted over hot coals as a special treat of sweet meat, and even the pig's bladder inflated and used as a toy for the girls.

The "Little House" tableau of harvest-time abundance meshed with my own childhood summers spent visiting the Northern Maine potato farm where my mother grew up. There, I watched as my grandmother canned tomatoes and wax beans and pickled beets and crab apples and made wild strawberry jam and froze brook trout to fry in cornmeal for breakfasts through the whole snowy winter.

From the "Charcuterie" book that I have hunched over again and again in recent months, I learn the history of these practices, and am reminded of the fact that, for example, my favorite sandwich, a Reuben, is constructed of three preserved foods: the brined corned beef, the pickled cabbage sauerkraut and cheese. Andean peoples were freezing potatoes thousands of years ago; Egyptians used salt to preserve their food as well as their mummies; according to Ruhlman and Polcyn, they "may have been the first to take the hard, bitter fruit of an olive tree and soak it in saltwater to make that fruit not only edible, but delicious"; Celts invented preserved pig -- ham smoked over beech and juniper branches.

Of course, the reason Ma Ingalls made headcheese and my grandmother made crisp pickles out of green beans had to do with a need to preserve the edibility and nutrition of foods in which freshness is fleeting, and not the trendy theatrics of a salumi tray or a dilly bean hanging out of a Bloody Mary at brunch.

Here in 21st century Brooklyn, we have not only refrigeration, but 24-hour supermarkets and bodegas and a Fairway market full of produce all year round. Also, we have pizza and Thai food and sushi flown overnight from Japan's fish market. I can buy beautifully made, wholesome, responsibly prepared local food. If I didn't have a freezerful of preserved pork products, I could run literally two blocks down to a store that has not only pancetta, but also heritage pancetta, grass-fed pork guanciale, and mozzarella that's still warm from being shaped in hot water by the old man who's been doing it his whole life in the back room.

So why am I curing my own bacon?

Well, for one thing, it's fun. And not surprisingly, given my personal history with food, I fell for a guy who, when he says he's going to make soup, takes out one of the 12 kinds of homemade stock he has frozen, and when he says he's going to make burgers, starts considering what kind of bun he'll bake for them. My favorite Ziploc in the freezer reads "very salty piglet gravy." There is very little in the home we now share that is not made from scratch, and in turn, very little that is not carefully considered, prepared, enjoyed, savored and respected.

Next page: When you hold an animal's parts in your hands, you feel a responsibility to put them to good use