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Preparing Bacon for Breakfast
The bacon must be fresh and in fine condition. It is cut with a keen knife, the under bones being cut off, and both edges pared neatly, also the end opposite from the string for hanging it up. Then cut up the requisite number of slices for immediate use, and no more. Thin slices are always preferable, so that the bacon, whether boiled or fried, will be crisp and tasty. When cutting the slices, be careful not to detach the skin; also cut crosswise, but never lengthwise. Arrange on the broiler, and broil over a moderate fire for two minutes on each side. Dress on a hot dish, serving at once. Four minutes is plenty of time for the frying.
Bacon Salted, Dried and Smoked The previous description applies precisely with regard to the salting and drying. The next step is the smoking. The smoke is generally that of burning wood or straw, hickory chips or corncobs. Woods containing resins, such as pine, are not advisable, as they would give an unpleasant flavor to the bacon. They are usually dried slowly over the smoke made by burning sawdust, oak or beach, the fire being kept night and day by smothering with dry sawdust. The flitches should be hung up high until quite dry, but not so hard that the rind begins to peel off. Sometimes the rubbing over the flitch with bran is advocated, although not especially recommended, as it encourages flies to settle on it. This may be prevented by wrapping in bags before they are suspended.
Oscar is describing a hotel larder that took delivery of whole sides of cured pork and cut breakfast rashers to order. The cooking instructions still hold; the curing notes at the end are a description of a trade practice, not a workable recipe.
- Flitch, rind and stringA flitch is a whole side of cured pork, hung by a loop of string and squared off with a knife before slicing. Almost none of this preparation applies to supermarket bacon, which arrives skinless, boneless and already trimmed.
- Cut crosswiseCutting across the flitch gives the familiar short rasher with a band of lean and a band of fat; cutting lengthwise gives long strips of mostly one or the other. On a modern slab of belly bacon the rule is the same: slice against the grain of the muscle.
- "A moderate fire"On a broiler this means the rack set a few inches from a steady coal bed, not a fierce one, so the fat renders before the lean scorches. Under a domestic broiler, use medium and watch it; dripping fat under a hot element flares.
- Two minutes a side is for dry-cured baconMuch supermarket bacon is brine-pumped and gives up water before it gives up fat, so it will steam for the first couple of minutes and needs longer. Reckon on four to six minutes a side in a pan. The book gives no oven method at all; if you want one, a rack at around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes is the modern equivalent.
- "Whether boiled or fried"The sentence is about slices either way, and Oscar's point is that thin cutting suits both treatments. Boiled bacon may also have meant a whole cured joint simmered and served hot or cold, but the recipe does not say so.
- Slice only what you needSound advice for a dry-cured side hanging in a cold room, and still sound for a slab of bacon: an unsliced piece keeps far longer than loose rashers, which oxidise and go tallowy at the cut faces.
- The smoking notesWoods without resin, oak or beech sawdust smouldering day and night, hung high until dry but not so dry the rind lifts. This is accurate cold-smoking practice but it is a description, not a procedure: the salting stage is left to an earlier page and no cure weights, brine strengths or temperatures are given anywhere. Anyone curing pork at home should work from a current recipe with measured curing salt.
- Serving"dress on a hot dish, serving at once": a plate warmed enough that the fat does not congeal.
Oscar Tschirky's book came out of a large hotel kitchen, and pages like this one are really larder management written down: how the meat arrives, how it is trimmed, how little of it should be cut in advance. In 1896 the Waldorf would most likely have bought sides of dry-cured, wood-smoked bacon that hung in a cold room and were sliced by hand, which is why the instructions begin with bones and string rather than with a pan. The insistence on hickory, corncobs, oak or beech and the warning against pine is standard American smokehouse lore of the period; resinous softwoods carry terpenes that taste of turpentine in the fat. Commercial bacon changed in the decades after this book: mechanical slicers, brine injection and controlled smokehouses turned a farm and butcher's product into a packaged one, and the thin, crisp rasher Oscar recommends became the default rather than a mark of careful cutting.