Canadians abroad crave peameal bacon
We can video-conference with family, but we can’t Zoom back-bacon
WASHINGTON— We hadn’t had peameal bacon since Christmas. That quintessential Toronto food has long been a staple of the Keenan diet. My mother has made trips to St. Lawrence Market pretty much weekly for most of my life, often bringing home giant cornmealcovered slabs (and, in recent years, popping in on her adult children bearing multiplepound gifts of pork).
It’s also been the centrepiece of our traditional Christmas morning breakfasts. Our family visit home for the holidays in 2019 was no exception. We didn’t know then it would be our last visit — and our last back bacon — for a long while.
After I moved to Washington last fall to cover the U.S. for the Star, my family enjoyed trying out the local favourite foods: “half-smoke” sausage dogs smothered in chili; Peruvian chicken; fresh Maryland blue crabs; a sweet barbecue sauce called “Mumbo” and french fries coated in Old Bay seasoning. There’s a lot to like.
But there’s no peameal bacon — it generally isn’t available south of the border. (Famously, what they call “Canadian bacon” here is a smoked ham product you don’t find in Canada.) Of all the things we missed about home — our friends and family most of all, but also High Park and our local youth sports teams, the lampposts of Dundas Street in the Junction, uncomplicated health insurance — peameal bacon might have been the most unexpected. It hadn’t been a passion or obsession or anything, or even a food we thought too much about — it was just there, often between the halves of a warm kaiser roll.
It was part of the taste of home, and one we increasingly missed when planned trips to Toronto for spring break and the summer vacation got cancelled by the COVID-19 crisis.
We can video conference with our family, and see pictures of our favourite places; when the NHL season restarts, the indulgent cable package I splurged on will bring it into our living room. But you can’t Zoom call the smell and taste of a back bacon sandwich.
As Canada Day approached, we invited a Canadian family that lives in the area to a socially distanced backyard picnic — our first social event of any kind since COVID lockdowns began in March. We strung the patio with Canadian flags, and hunted down Clamato juice for Caesars. And I made an effort to find peameal bacon — surely some hipster butcher shop catered to the legion of Canadian diplomats by offering it as a niche specialty? Nope. I expanded my search. Importing meat seemed like a customs red-tape nightmare. A butcher shop in New Hampshire offered it by mail order at a predictably outrageous price, but even their express option wouldn’t arrive in time for Canada Day.
We served hamburgers and hot dogs instead.
But that failed national holiday quest hooked me on the idea. As it became clear that the six months since we’d been able to visit home would likely turn into a year or more, I fixed on this as a way to address homesickness. I took another look online at that New Hampshire butcher shop, and searched for closer alternatives. That’s when I came across a 2015 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a Canadian living there who made his own.
Wait, I thought. You can do that? Somehow — through a combination of the thickness of my skull and the easy availability of peameal bacon in Toronto — the idea had never occurred to me. There was a recipe included in the article. It didn’t even look all that hard.
I Googled around for other recipes, and amalgamated the best-sounding and easiest elements of the one in the Pittsburgh newspaper and some others from Canadian chefs. I needed to order a bright pink curing salt called “Prague powder #1,” but the other ingredients were staples: kosher salt, maple syrup, brown sugar, standard spices and cornmeal.
I got a pork loin from a local butcher shop and my 11-yearold daughter Irene and I made the first attempt of our lives at curing something. My wife Rebecca rolled her eyes — she’s of the opinion this was something we’d be better just looking forward to as a treat on some increasingly distant future visit to the Carousel Bakery than turning into a project. Not that she’d turn down a taste when we were done, you understand.
It took about a half-hour in the kitchen and five days in the fridge. When we finally sliced it, it was pleasingly close to the right shade of pink. We fried it up and it was ... way too salty. Not quite sweet enough. But recognizably peameal bacon.
After more than half a year, it tasted like home.
We tried again, adjusting the recipe a bit, and the second batch was still too salty, but otherwise tasted right. Blanching the slices for a few minutes before frying took the sodium level down to a tolerable level. We made sandwiches with the bacon and fried onions, cheese, tomato, and runny eggs on warm potato-bread rolls. It was delicious. I hinted to my kids that they now had an option if there was a day at their school when students were encouraged to bring in the foods from their home countries. All three of them immediately got very excited instead about the prospect of taking butter tarts. But they also loved the sandwiches.
I posted photos online and the response from many Canadian friends was the same as my own initial one: you can make your own? Yes, you can. You can find recipes easily online. No fancy culinary skill is required. (I’d offer our recipe but I didn’t develop it myself so it’s not mine, and we’re still not entirely happy with how salty it turns out.) It’s not even hard.
Of course, for most of you reading in the Toronto area, there isn’t much call for making your own. It’s available nearby, at fairly reasonable prices.
But for us, stuck 775 kilometres away on the wrong side of a restricted border for the foreseeable future, curing bacon turned out to be a temporary cure for homesickness.
Now we just have to find a recipe for Coffee Crisp.