Canadian bacon sits high on the global culinary hog

Firmer than ham and sweeter than the cut most of us serve with eggs, Canadian bacon can be served as-is or cooked, is a key element of a classic eggs Benedict, and is at home in a stir fry as it is in a quiche, or alongside roasted vegetables. Photo by bhofack2 /Getty Images/iStockphoto

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Any way you cut it, Canadian bacon is a source of national pride with roots as deep as the country itself.

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So why isn’t that what we call it?

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In the 1860s and after, Canada was where back bacon — delicious, lean, cured but not smoked pork end loin coated in peameal — came from. It’s why Toronto’s nickname is Hogtown, and why in 2016 the peameal bacon sandwich beat out such culinary titans as Jamaican patties, street meat and burritos to become the city’s signature dish.

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After setting up shop in what would become St. Lawrence Market in 1854, pork producer William Davies started sending the cured meat, coated in protective peameal, back to his family and then to customers in England in 1860, where the industrial boom was fuelling demand for preserved foods. 

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“Canadian bacon” became immensely popular. The home of what Davies dubbed the largest pork producer in the British Empire became synonymous with a central product of a thrumming export economy (led by pork and beef, meat and meat preparations are to this day among Canada’s highest value agro-food exports, according to The Canadian Encycopedia).

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Davies’s operation near the Don River was the oldest part of what would become Canada Packers, parts of which in turn exist in Maple Leaf Foods.

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Firmer than ham and sweeter than the cut most of us serve with eggs, Canadian bacon can be served as-is or cooked, is a key element of a classic eggs Benedict, and is at home in a stir fry as it is in a quiche, or alongside roasted vegetables. It’s also rumoured there is a segment of the population that puts it on pizza — with pineapple.

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The eponymous sandwich’s origins are also back at the St. Lawrence Market, where the Carosel Bakery was bought by Elso Biancolin and Joseph Homer in 1969. As the story goes, Biancolin noticed at the butcher they also owned that customers were passing over the end cuts of the pork loin in favour of the centre. To avoid waste, he started slicing and frying the as-yet underappreciated peameal bacon and, according to a 2017 TVO article, serving it on a Kaiser bun.

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It became a staple at their stall in the market, now served on a Portuguese country roll swapped in during a supply interruption, then kept: “People liked it so much that that’s what we stuck with,” Biancolin says in the article. “It has the right body: it’s not too light, it’s not too heavy, so it complements the whole experience when you chew on the meat and the bread together.”

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Peameal bacon’s status as a regional delicacy may be concentrated in southern Ontario and points east, but there’s no denying its place in this country’s culinary history and as the reason when Americans, Brits and the Irish call one of the tastiest preparations of pork “Canadian.”

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