With Companions like these....

I've always been a fan of the Oxford Companion to Food. Famously,  Alan Davidson did the original almost solo, Johnson's Dictionary stizz. For a long stretch, it was the preferred breakfast table reading, its brief yet erudite essays ideal mental fodder as I worked to diminish the high levels of blood in my caffeine system. I've given it as a wedding gift,  bundled with the Companion to Wine. But for a while, maybe as long as the Cod has been swimming, it's been on the shelf.  Via the Grinder I found a rather alarming disciussion of the next fast food, er, "quick service" ingredient. Beyond the discussions of "deconstructed"food at El Pollo Loco which surely have Derrida doing more spins than an extra in Blades of Steel, I came across a reference to Pancetta Bacon, which  one Eric Hickman of Artuzzi's Italian kitchen* sees as the next big thing. Consideriing that pancetta is a variety of bacon, cured in roughly the same way, except not usually smoked, unlike bacon, which usually is, "pancetta bacon" makes no sense. I've argued before that the hidden danger in fast food is cultural, rather than scientific, in that the industry's indifference to the significations of words is part of what makes it possible to feed people crap and call it food. Once the consumer accepts that Caesar salad can mean iceberg spooged with mayo, then Soylent Green is not so hard to imagine.

So, as I tried to suss out if Mr. Hickman didn't know or didn't care about the relationship between pancetta and bacon, or if "pancetta" is a way to charge more for the same cured pork belly rolling out of Smithfield plants all day long,  I checked the OCF entry for pancetta.* It reads thus:

Pancetta: Salted belly of pork, an important ingredient in Italian cookery, and also to the Spanish tocino. It exists in many regional variations, with different periods of maturing, different aromatics, etc. The type called guanciale, which is taken from the 'cheek', in front of the belly, is very popular in C. Italy, especially Lazio.

Pancetta occurs in several famous pasta dishes, e.g. Spaghetti alla carbonara.

Actually, as documented here, and elsewhere, and by pretty much everyone else you ask, guanciale is the cured jowl of a pig. Yes, the cheek and jowl are, you know, cheek by jowl, and one could argue that the cheek of a pig is in front of the belly, but the logical conclusion would be, especially with the quotation marks, that the front of the belly was known as the "cheek," in the same way that there are nuggets of meat on a chicken called "oysters." However , he failure to mention jowls puts this entry in the category of flat wrong, which is rare for a reference work from a major university press. Have others had similar experiences with OCF?

*I don't see this chain presenting a challenge to, say,  the Mario empire, but it does seem more legit than Olive Garden.

**I have the 1999 edition. If someone wanted to check their 2006 edition, I'd be obliged.

Update: A friend writes: I can't find the '06 oxford, but in the '02 penguin paperback rerelease,
it's still as you quoted.

Comments

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Sadly, the time has finally come (probably) when google blog search is more reliable than my memory, because I can't find the thing I imagine having written about this years ago. However, I do remember coming across some relatively substantive issues like this in the OCF.

I prefer to think of it as a monument to AD rather than a truly definitive reference, something no one person, however polymathic, could write. (Also it is perhaps unfair to expect people of his generation to fully grasp the complexity of Italian and Mexican food).