From rasher with love

AH, bacon. Breakfast behemoth, saviour of the sandwich and the frying pan’s erstwhile friend. Who can resist that pork-scented siren call, an olfactory allurement so seductive that it turns taste buds tumescent and vegetarian virtue the way of all flesh? When a man is tired of bacon, as Samuel Johnson almost said, he is also tired of life.

Gloriously democratic, bacon cares little for class, cash or snobbery, devoured on Formica-topped tables and solid silver platters alike. It pays no heed to the bourgeois strictures of formal eating, either. A pre-dawn snack and a feast before bed, crowning a burger, buried in burrito, slow-cooked with cabbage, sprinkled into salad or even slipped into fudge. ‘Landlord, bring us beans and bacon and a bottle of your finest Burgundy,’ cries some jolly character