Broiled Bacon
Lay thin slices of bacon on a hissing hot frying pan. When transparent, turn. When dry and crisp, drain and dry on brown paper.
Bacon cooked in the Oven Place thin slices on broiler and cook over dripping pan in hot oven. This method requires more time, but is much more wholesome.
Two methods in one short entry, and the terminology is period rather than literal: nothing here is broiled in the modern sense of cooking under a top element.
- "Broiled" means the frying panIn 1907 usage, broiling covered dry cooking over direct heat, including a hot skillet with no added fat. The bacon renders its own grease as it goes; do not oil the pan.
- The hissing hot panThis is the one instruction worth arguing with. A pan preheated until it hisses will scorch the lean and seize the strips into curls before the fat has rendered. Starting the slices in a cold or barely warm pan renders more evenly and gives flatter, crisper bacon.
- "Transparent" as the turning cueThe fat goes from opaque white to glassy when it has rendered. That is a better signal than a clock, and it still works.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" is a period term with no fixed figure; contemporary glosses put it somewhere around 400 to 450F. On a rack set over a sheet pan, thin slices take about 15 to 20 minutes; thick-cut needs closer to 25.
- Brown paperUnbleached grocer's paper was the standard drain. Paper towels do the same job; a wire rack does it better, since the underside stays crisp instead of steaming.
- "Much more wholesome"The reasoning of the day was that oven-cooked bacon sits out of its own fat rather than frying in it. The nutritional claim is dated, but the practical point holds: the oven gives flatter slices and no spatter.
- The bacon itselfTurn-of-the-century bacon was generally drier and saltier than today's. Modern sweet-cured supermarket bacon browns faster and burns sooner, so watch it earlier than these directions suggest.
- YieldFigure two to three slices a person as a breakfast portion; a 1 lb package runs to about 16 to 20 slices standard-cut, and considerably more thin-sliced.
Lowney's Cook Book, published by the chocolate company as a promotional volume, is a general household manual as much as a candy book, and its meat chapter reflects standard American breakfast practice of the period. The oven method recommended here as "more wholesome" belongs to a wider early-twentieth-century preoccupation with rendering and draining fat, a concern visible across domestic-science writing of the 1890s and 1900s, where fried food was regarded with suspicion and "greasiness" was a fault of cookery rather than a virtue. Brown paper as a draining surface appears throughout cookbooks of the era for everything from doughnuts to croquettes; the wrapping paper that came home from the grocer was simply the absorbent material every kitchen had on hand, long before paper towelling became a kitchen commonplace.