Ham and bacon were once cured in the very same barrel
Long before fridges, curing pork with salt was the only way to keep it safe for months. Ham and bacon were simply different cuts treated identically, sometimes packed together. Refrigeration made curing unnecessary, but people had grown so fond of the flavour that bacon never went away.
The name traces back to a Proto-Germanic word for back meat. Bacon usually comes from the belly or the leaner parts of the back, cured either wet, by soaking in or injecting brine, or dry, by rubbing with salt. Nitrites or nitrates speed the process and fix the pink colour. Afterwards it may be air-dried for weeks or months, boiled, or smoked for up to eighteen hours over different woods, or even corn cobs or peat. An early American cookbook, The Virginia Housewife of 1824, seems to assume bacon is always smoked, warning only against letting the fire get too hot.
Modern ham comes from the pig's hind end and is cured with sweeter brine. Salt pork uses similar cuts to bacon but is never smoked and far saltier. Producers may treat bacon against the Trichinella roundworm, which heat, freezing, drying or smoking destroy, and add sodium polyphosphates so it slices neatly and spits less in the pan.
Which cut counts as bacon depends on where you live. Streaky bacon from the belly, with long ribbons of fat and muscle, dominates in the United States. Britain and Ireland mostly eat leaner back bacon from the loin. Italy's pancetta is rolled belly, a staple of carbonara, and guanciale is cured but unsmoked pork cheek. Canadians mean belly bacon when they just say bacon, but also eat peameal bacon, unsmoked loin coated in cornmeal and once rolled in ground dried peas, beloved in southern Ontario. Maple syrup often goes into the cure there.
In German, bacon overlaps with Speck, and the English word is used for breakfast slices, though Bavarians love grilled pork belly called Wammerl. Tiny cubes known in Austria as Grammerln flavour soups, dumplings and potato dishes. In places with large Jewish and Muslim communities, whose faiths forbid pork, turkey, beef or lamb is cured to imitate it, and soy versions exist too.
Source: Bacon
