Bringing home the bacon

         

Wonder where that expression originated? 

Wonder no more, because with Google it’s possible to find out anything. Apparently it was first coined in 1906 in relation to a boxing match, where one of the contestants’ mothers told her son to ‘bring home the bacon’. But there is a more romantic version based on the story of the ‘Dunmow Flitch’, flitch being a medieval word for a side of bacon. Apparently there was a couple in Great Dunmow, Essex, in 1104, whose love for each other so impressed the Prior of Little Dunmow that he awarded them a flitch of bacon. After that, there continued to be a contest there where the most devoted couple would win a flitch of bacon – even Chaucer recorded this competition in the Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, written around 1395.

All that to say that I am going through bacon at unprecedented levels for Barehillock, due to our regular weekly guests. It smells divine to cook but the pan is a devil to clean.

So between bacon for our guests, and pigs’ ears for Dusty, the piggies’ worst enemy may no longer be the Big Bad Wolf. 

I don’t like that thought, because actually I love pigs’ big ears and curly tails, (to look at, not to eat!!) and I cherish a memory of feeding corn cobs to a corral of pigs at a great uncle’s farm in Wisconsin when I was 5. They are nice animals, and apparently very smart.

During World War II, when shortages of food in the UK spawned rationing, someone had a bright idea of substituting mutton for pork and making a sort of replacement bacon, nicknamed macon.

It must have been as revolting as it sounds, as it didn’t even last out the war. 

I guess as long as we continue to run a bed and breakfast, we will continue to bring home the bacon by the kilo. Take cover, little pigs!