“Wilhelm understood he was being put on notice and did not express his opinion. He ate and ate. He did not hurry but kept putting food on his plate until he had gone through the muffins and his father’s strawberries, and then some pieces of bacon that were left; he had several cups of coffee, and when he was finished he sat gigantically in a state of arrest and didn’t seem to know what he should do next.”
Bellow, Seize the Day
“General Dreedle, the wing commander, was a blunt, chunky, barrel-chested man in his early fifties. His nose was squat and red, and he had lumpy white, bunched-up eyelids circling his small gray eyes like haloes of bacon fat.”
Heller, Catch-22
Mrs K. Jameson, The Nursery Cookery Book, decorations by Muriel Harris, foreword by Sir J. Gomer Berry (London: Frederick Warne, 1929).
Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossomy
Many things are better
flavored with bacon
Sweet Life, My Love,
didn’t you ever try
this delicacy — the marrow
in the bone?
And don’t be afraid
to pour wine over cabbage
— Lorine Niedecker [previously covered here]
(in the latest NY’er, HT Steph B.)
“They trudged out of the dark, scraping their boots free from lime-splodges and phlegm. They munched cold bacon. The lamps grew plump with oily reliable light.”
Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns 23
DeLillo, White Noise (snipped from Frank Lentricchia’s book)
Their plump breasts clothed succulently with a counterpane of fat bacon
…
— Wilkie Collins, My Black Mirror
(will be searching the novels to see if ‘succulent’ is as frequent as it seems to be)
Juvenal (trans. Dryden perhaps?)
“Let us see what would be the consumption of one family; let it be a family of five persons; a man, wife, and three children, one child big enough to work, one big enough to eat heartily, and one a baby; and this is a pretty fair average of the state of people in the country. Such a family would want 5lb. of bread a day; they would want a pound of mutton a day; they would want two pounds of bacon a day; they would want, on an average, winter and summer, a gallon and a half of beer a day; for I mean that they should live without the aid of the eastern or the western slave-drivers. […] Hogs differ so much in their propensity to fat that it is difficult to calculate about them : but this is a very good rule : when you see a fat hog, and know how many scores he will weigh, set down to his account a sack (half a quarter) of barley for every score of his weight; for, let him have been educated (as the French call it) as he may, this will be about the real cost of him when he is fat.”
Cobbett, Rural Rides
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