SOURCE: WIKTIONARY.ORG
«In 1805, 6,000 pigs were exported from Ireland. By 1813 this had increased to 14,000 and by 1821 it had reached 104,000.»
FOR A LONG time, people made bacon on farms, entirely separately from each other. Everyone would salt and smoke their own meat, just as they would brew their own beer, bake their own bread and make their own jam. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution hit England that we started to see the sort of modern, mass-produced bacon we find in shops today.
PHOTO: THINKSTOCK.COM
PHOTO: THINKSTOCK.COM
In 17th-century England, pork was a lot less common than it would be a few hundred years later. It wasn’t until the arrival of the potato that pig farming really took off, when farmers began to use potatoes as feed. The numbers varied from region to region, but, in the Midlands, as many as 50–60 per cent of farmers were raising pigs and sides of meat could be seen hanging in many a cottage chimney.
Bacon was largely a poor man’s food and it was common to keep a few sides of it in the house for emergencies. The ability to store bacon for long periods did more to keep people from stealing than any number of religious ceremonies, threats, penalties and prisons. Bacon helped to hold society together when times were tough. Only the very poorest had to live without the safety net of salted and smoked bacon (that said, it’s worth remembering that the word ‘bacon’ was defined much more broadly in pre-Industrial Revolution England than it is today and could refer to any type of salted pork).
But the times they were a-changing, and by the dawn of the 19th century industrialisation was hammering on the doors of society. In England, at least, one firm in particular was associated with the wide-scale mass production of bacon, founded by brothers John and Henry Harris from the town of Calne.
Picture the scene …
‘Hi, Henry!’ calls John to his little brother, who is busy weighing salt. It’s here, in the back room, that he makes his bacon.
‘I’ve run out of meat for bacon, John. Should we head out and see if we can get some more?’
The brothers pack up their things and get ready to go out. Their bacon is becoming more and more popular, and it wouldn’t do for their customers’ demand to outstrip supply.
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Henry was married to Sophia Perkins and inherited the grocery and butcher’s shop from her parents. A few years earlier, John and Henry’s father had died, leaving their mother to keep the family shop up and running for a few years before Henry took that over as well.
Meanwhile, John had opened his own shop a little way down the high street. Both of them salted and smoked their own bacon and sold it over the counter.
«The ice came from local water whenever it was cold enough in the English villages. When there was no local ice, they imported it from Norway.»
Luckily, they didn’t have to go far to find their ingredients. Calne was a popular stopover for people taking their pigs to London. Many of these pigs had been transported en masse from Ireland – on any given day, as many as 1,400 pigs could pass through Customs in Bristol alone. Along the way, they met up with English pigs that were being transported.
In 1805, 6,000 pigs were exported from Ireland. By 1813 this had increased to 14,000, and by 1821 it had reached 104,000. The figure continued to climb as the advent of steamships made the process ever more efficient. By 1837 as many as 600,000 Irish pigs were turned into food in England.
Pigs held a special position in Ireland. Englishmen travelling to the Emerald Isle reacted with disbelief to the sight of pigs living indoors, right alongside people. And there was no shortage of pigs. Great herds of them – it’s estimated that at one point there were as many as 1.4 million. That was before the Potato Famine.
The Irish could get a much better price for their pigs in England. When Englishmen asked how they could let their pigs live together with them, the usual answer was, ‘Well, they pay their rent.’
Being a butcher in the little town of Calne wasn’t a bad way to make a living. The fattest pigs never stood a chance of making it all the way to London and many died along the way. According to a contemporary witness named George Bowles, ‘(t)hey just can’t cope with the stress of the journey’ and it was common to lose as many as 40–50 animals from a large herd.
John and Henry had no difficulty finding pigs to buy. A quick handshake sealed the deal and the fattest pigs, the ones that probably wouldn’t have survived the rest of the journey anyway, were easy to barter for. The trade continued to grow steadily, but everything changed for the brothers and their family in the second half of the 1840s. That was when the parasite Phytophthora infestans hit the potato crops of Ireland, devastating them. The famine that follwed left millions of people starving to death, and it was similarly catastrophic for pigs, who were largely raised on potatoes.
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Once the flow of pigs stopped, the Harris family were presented with something of a problem. They decided to send John’s youngest son to America and so George Harris set off on his own adventure. For a full year, he travelled around in search of bacon, which he sent home to Calne. The adventure was at least partly successful and after a quick visit home in 1848 he again set sail across the ocean, determined to establish a bacon factory in Schenectady, New York. He lasted a year before he was forced to throw in the towel and return to the old country.
On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a success story. But George’s experiences in the USA would prove vital to the future of the Harris family business.
In the USA, George had been introduced to modern cooling techniques. In Calne the sides of bacon would typically be covered in salt for the whole summer. It was easier in winter, when the colder temperatures made it easier to make bacon without risking ruining the meat, but the huge amount of salt required for the summer bacon had clear disadvantages. In the USA, George had seen how vast quantities of ice were used during production and had the brainwave of adopting the same technique at home. The first icehouse was set up in 1856, with the ice being stored in large chambers on an iron floor above the room where the sides of bacon were kept. They found that the cold isolated the room effectively, so started to use it in the walls as well. Later, in 1864, Thomas Harris would actually patent this design of the icehouse.
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The ice came from local water, whenever it was cold enough in the English villages. When there was no local ice, they imported it from Norway, where ice was rarely in short supply. All this ice allowed the Harrises to precisely adjust the salt content of their bacon, and before long they were making the best bacon around. They had a huge head start on everyone else, who rapidly started to adopt the same approach. The old form of heavily salted bacon was soon history, making way for what would eventually become known as Wiltshire bacon, a term still in use today. The Harris family were granted an extra honour when they