What is the Perfect Bacon Sandwich?

Its origins, delights and dangers

Francis Bacon — Inventor of the bacon sandwich

The bacon sandwich. What better way to bless your mouth than with a bacon butty? A simple yet beautiful symphony of meat, bread and sauce. I wonder how one could live without having experienced such a heavenly sandwich. But I did. For a time.

Not many people remember the first time they tried a bacon butty, but I do. I was born in Hong Kong. And in Hong Kong you have to go out of your way to get a good piece of bacon, and I mean proper bacon. None of that streaky crap, or the lean cuts that are closer to ham.

It wasn’t a matter of availability. There’s plenty of pork around. In fact, the Chinese have one of the highest rates of pork consumption in the world. It was, and in my opinion still is, hard to get your hands on good bacon.

Kevin Bacon — great great grand nephew of Francis Bacon

I can’t remember how old I was exactly, but I was definitely in single digits when my father realised I had never experienced a proper bacon sandwich. So instead of doing my maths homework, we went on a quest for the perfect bacon sarnie.

He decided to call in an expert. An English friend of his, a Cockney by the name of ‘Bookie’. For those of you not familiar with the term, a Cockney is by definition an East London native with an incredibly unique accent and a penchant for eating jellied eels. Sadly their kind are in decline. If you would like to learn more about Cockneys, I suggest you see a documentary that details their history and customs, called ‘EastEnders’.

So there I was, a young Hong Kong boy, face to face with a real life Cockney. “Ello mate! Ow ’re you? Me name is Bookie, noice to meat ya.” I think I hid behind my father’s legs during our first encounter.

So after a little chit chat, we began to talk about the serious nature of sarnies. This is the recipe he recounted to me that day.

Bookie’s Bacon Butty

Ingredients:

Smoked thick-cut Bacon

White Bread (Warburtons preferably)

Butter

HP Sauce

Method:

Grill or fry the bacon for 2–3 mins each side. (You want to make sure the fat is properly rendered, but not so much that it becomes too crispy.) Take two slices of white bread and leave it untoasted. Butter both slices of bread.(Can prove difficult if butter is too cold) Place bacon on bread and smother in HP sauce. Cap it and eat it.

Simple, but incredibly satisfying. The soft bread gives way to the taut delectable bacon, which by now is dripping with butter. Just as you think it can’t get any better, your tongue begins to tingle. The sauce has arrived. That subtle yet spicy sting cuts through the grease and reminds you that there is indeed a god. Yes, in my eyes, HP, bacon, butter and bread is the perfect combination.

But here’s where things get controversial. What is the perfect bacon butty? Good ol’ Bookie swore by this recipe, but the fact remains it changes from region to region. Some people prefer Ketchup over Brown, some prefer toasted to untoasted, and others, margarine over butter. This simple sandwich has divided the British nation, if not the world.

So I decided to do some research and stumbled across this interesting infographic.

Here, you can see a clear divide. It’s as if someone drew a line directly from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. People living on this longitude seem to worship brown sauce. Yet on either side of that line, are ketchup lovers.

How is this possible? What geographical or anthropological reasoning could explain this phenomena?

It’s a well know fact that people from the UK are prone to debate when it comes to food or drink. Everyone knows that.

But did you know that 83 per cent of all violence in the UK is attributed to culinary disputes?

Could it have something to do with regional identity? I personally swear by HP sauce, so I found it strange that the Eastern counties went with Ketchup. Could it have something to do with politics, class, or even gender?

I did some sleuthing and it turns out there is no correlation whatsoever between politics and sauce preference. Strange.

But on a serious note, research has revealed that if you lack the skill to consume a simple bacon sarnie, your career prospects will inevitably suffer.