Bacon

Bacon is a type of salt cured pork made from various cuts, typically the belly or other less fatty parts of the back, eaten as a breakfast side, a central sandwich ingredient such as in the BLT, or a flavoring agent in other dishes; in Middle English the word originally referred to all pork. It is cured either by wet curing, soaking or injecting the meat in brine, or by dry curing, rubbing it with salt, and may then be dried for weeks or months, smoked, or boiled, with fresh and dried bacon typically cooked before eating, most often by pan frying. The world's first commercial bacon processing plant opened in Calne, Wiltshire, in the 1770s under John Harris, industrializing what had been a domestic practice, and bacon is also used to bard roasts such as venison and pheasant; in the United States, bacon sales climbed 9.5 percent in 2013 to nearly 4 billion dollars.