Platter
Bacon is the reason I started to finally eat pork. I’d grown up in a no-pork-no-shellfish household and stuck to my guns re swine until fall 2002 when I just couldn’t take it any more. Bacon smelled too too good for me to not eat. So I bought a pack, cooked it up and basically ate BLTs for the entirety of my senior year in college. And I haven’t looked back. All in on the pork. All in on the shellfish. All in on most foods, generally. Because: why not?
But (in addition to mushrooms) there’s one thing I still cannot do. And that is British “bacon.” The smell of it cooking nauseates me. The taste of it disappoints me. The texture saddens me. It’s basically a thickish slab of cured ham with a ribbon of chewy fat at its base, and is what we in the US call “Canadian bacon.” The Brits call ours “streaky bacon,” aka streaked with fat, deliciousness and flavor. And the one time they really like to eat streaky bacon in the UK is at Christmas, wrapped around little cocktail sausages— a double porcine heart attack they call “pigs in blankets.”
Yup, “pigs in blankets.” And again my mind is blown. There is no buttery flaky pastry — the bacon is the blanket! I die. And I dislike them immensely and vowed to never serve them. And then I had a kid. And that kid is British. And then I had a party. And it was Christmastime. And that silver platter of pigs in blankets you see was the first thing to go. Go figure.
