bacon

bacon flesh of hogs—especially from the sides, belly, or back—that has been preserved by being salted or pickled and then dried with or without wood smoke. Traditionally, the process consisted of soaking the pork in brine or rubbing it in a salt mixture by hand, then smoking the sides in smoke from an open chimney. It sometimes took three or four months. Bacon is still home cured in some rural communities, but the bulk of its manufacture is carried on in large industrial meatpacking plants equipped to slaughter, dress, cure, smoke, and sell on a large scale. Bacon refers to different cuts in different countries. In the United States it usually means the side between the fifth rib and the hipbone. In Europe, the word bacon generally refers to one half of a fattened pig. Bacon has one of the highest fat contents of any cut of meat.

bacon XIV. — OF. bacon, AN. -un — Frankish *bako ham, flitch. f. Gmc. *bakam BACK1.

bacon in early use, bacon was used to mean not just the cured meat from the back and sides of a pig, but also fresh pork, the meat most readily available to the rural population; from this, the word was used to mean a rustic, a clown.

Recorded from Middle English, the word comes via Old French from a Germanic word meaning ‘ham, flitch’, related to back.


bring home the bacon achieve success. The phrase probably derives from bacon in much earlier save one's bacon, recorded from the mid 17th century, and may in turn go back to idea that pig's meat was an essential and common article of food.