Six Degrees of Bacon

James Villas' new book celebrates everyone's favorite food.

by Drew Lazor


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Published: Oct 2, 2007

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How much does James Villas love bacon? Why, he thought you'd never ask.

"Even vegetarians [and] religious sects that outlaw bacon still love that aroma," says Villas, a veteran food writer and cookbook author whose work has appeared in publications like Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Gourmet and The New York Times. "It's intoxicating. There's no one who doesn't love bacon. It's the greatest food God has ever created."

Tell us how you really feel, Jim.

Villas' lifelong love affair serves as the fulcrum for The Bacon Cookbook ($35, Wiley & Sons), his exhaustive new resource that manages to fill your skillet with more bacon-related information than you could ever fry. But the heavily researched tome doesn't come off the least bit clinical; Villas' approachable prose and sheer wealth of experience makes for engrossing — and hunger-inducing — reading.

While Americans love bacon, the average Yankee palate is relegated to tried-and-true classics like BLTs, Cobb salads and the like. Since Villas' 27-year stint as the food and wine editor of Town & Country magazine gave him the opportunity to travel frequently, he made it a mission to seek out uncommon takes on his beloved food. "I was always aware that there were all these intriguing, wonderful bacon dishes all over the world," says Villas, a native of North Carolina who remembers buying bacon from farmers markets with his family as a child. "[I wanted to] to expose those dishes we don't know a damn thing about. There's a wonderful world of bacon out there."

And one need only thumb through The Bacon Cookbook to grasp just how wonderful it really is. An early section runs through international varieties of the delicacy. There's British oak-cured Wiltshire bacon, cut from saddleback pigs; Italian pancetta affumicata; and whimsically named gypsy bacon, which Hungarians blacken with pig blood. And Villas' collection of recipes reads like a grease-smudged passport: Swedish mussel and bacon sandwiches, twice-cooked Chinese slab bacon, Philippine pork adobo, Bahamian lobster and bacon ragout.

But Villas doesn't gloss over the home team — he also touches on a selection of American regional specialties, from Southern-style smothered chicken to the California Hangtown Fry, an omelette-esque amalgamation of bacon, oysters and eggs that has roots in the Gold Rush. In Villas' eyes, these native dishes are made even more exciting by the fact that many high-quality bacons are being crafted stateside. "For the first time in the past 10 to 15 years, we've been getting some incredible artisanal bacons [in the U.S.]," says Villas.

The dusty old adage is that smoky, salty, greasy strips of pork can do absolutely no wrong. But has Villas ever run into a bacon dish that simply didn't work? "No. Uh-uh. Not at all," says Villas matter-of-factly. "It goes from the lowest echelon to the Elysian fields." Case in point: the book's dessert section, which features recipes like bacon-wrapped figs (pictured).

It's hard to picture an enthusiast like Villas getting upset over anything bacon-related. But just try to bring up "express" varieties or reduced-fat Sizzlean (remember Sizzlean?) and see what happens. "I don't even address that subject," says Villas disapprovingly. "In the book, there's not even a mention of that ridiculous crap. It's simply heresy."

And don't even get him started on the health question. Villas champions moderation: He eats no more than two slices of bacon at a time. (He admits that he sometimes cheats and has three.) "Since it's so good, people think they can eat it like peanuts," he says. "But you don't eat caviar by the spoonful."

(drew.lazor@citypaper.net)

The Bacon Cookbook hits bookstores Mon., Oct. 15.