Bringing home the bacon

Mar 27 2009 by Jane Hall, The Journal

Bacon sandwiches, Andrew Birley, Jeff Vickers, Justin Blake

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Taste is joining forces with this year’s Eat! NewcastleGateshead food and drink festival to sniff out the North East’s best bacon butty. And as Jane Hall finds, the region has a long and distinguished history in bringing home the bacon.

AHH ... the smell of bacon wafting on the breeze. There’s nothing guaranteed to wake up dormant taste buds more first thing in the morning.

So addictive is the odour that even vegetarians have been known to waver at the thought of a bacon sandwich.

And it’s an aroma that has had northerners drooling for at least 2,000 years.

For it seems the sight, sound and smell of sizzling bacon come first light of day was as familiar along the 73 miles of Hadrian’s Wall nearly two millennia ago as it is now in the region’s homes, cafes, sandwich bars and truck stops.

Soldiers stationed on this most potent symbol of Roman power believed in kick-starting their day the right way and enjoyed nothing better than consuming crisp, thick-cut slices of home cured lardum.

And in a classic example of the simplest idea being the best, it’s a tradition that is still being played out on the Wall to this day.

Just as the Roman Army was said to march on its stomach, so it seems do archaeologists. Those working at the Vindolanda Roman fort and civilian settlement south of Hadrian’s Wall are just as partial to a bacon butty at the beginning of their working day as the very people whose lives they are now digging up from the past.

Andrew Birley, director of excavations at The Vindolanda Trust at Bardon Mill, says: “We love our bacon sandwiches here at Vindolanda and feel we are carrying on a fine and noble tradition.

“With freshly baked bread, newly churned butter combined with bacon cooked in a smoky clay oven or over an open fire, it is possible that some of the best bacon butties ever to have been consumed in the history of Northumberland were regularly demolished by the Romans.

“All they needed was a ketchup, and luckily for them they even had their own version of that, although today we might baulk at the idea of adding fish sauce to a bacon butty.

“It is safe to say that the traditional bacon butty has a heritage which stretches back thousands of years in Northumberland.”

Andrew, whose preference is streaky rashers on freshly baked bread with butter and tomato ketchup (“It’s just the job first thing”), believes Vindolanda can still lay claim to being the home of the best bacon sarnie.

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