Your Life

Saturday, Nov. 07, 2009

Wakin’ up to the makin’ of bacon

“Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon: Stories of Pork Bellies, Hush Puppies, Rock ‘N’ Roll Music and Bacon Fat Mayonnaise” (Zingerman’s Press, $29.99), by Ari Weinzweig

By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI

Chicago Tribune

What it is: Essentially — no joke here, a real bible of all things smoked pig — an engrossing, affably rambling, borderline obsessive one-stop swine seminar, from the winding genealogy of Wilshire-cut British bacon to an appreciation of the physically repulsive lardo (cured back fat from the chubbiest Italian oinkers), with two-dozen bacon-centric recipes that you don’t see every day (such as oyster and bacon pilau).

That said, what we have here is also a genuine discovery, not widely distributed (yet) — the first major release from Zingerman’s Press, the new publishing arm of Zingerman’s Deli, an ever-expanding Ann Arbor, Mich., institution. (I picked up my copy in Ann Arbor. Elsewhere, try zingermanspress.com.)

Praise (and quibbles): Weinzweig, Zingerman’s co-founder (and a Chicago native), has a conversational writing style — so loose, the book unnecessarily sacrifices a bit of the authority you expect from someone knee-deep in pig parts. On the other hand, a lack of pretense is refreshing for a guy who knows the difference between bacon in central Kentucky and bacon in southwestern Kentucky. A handful of recipe photos wouldn’t have hurt (the rare Californian dish hangtown fry, which has gorgeous shades of gray and brown, could use a reference point for the uninitiated), but the book’s folksy design and left turns (such as the art of the bacon-wrapped saltine) amount to one of the more compulsively readable single-subject food histories we’ve come across.

Why we think you’ll like it: Because it’s like a long, fun conversation, and because bacon, for which Weinzweig makes a convincing case, has become “the olive oil of North America” — its smoke as central to American flavors as olive oil is to the Mediterranean.