Hi I’m reading Lonesome Dove and keep coming across this food being mentioned. Google’s not much help.

Edit – a food maybe breakfast typically. Seems to have a meat component and eaten with cornbread.

16 comments

  1. Never heard that term. What is the context?

    I assume its related to back bacon.

    Edit: I’m dumb. You answered part of my question.

    Its almost certainly some form of [back bacon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_bacon) which differs slightly from what Americans normally expect to be bacon in the form of pork belly.

  4. Maybe another name for salted pork? That would have been a cowboy staple.

  6. I look up terms a lot from 1700-1900s since I decipher old documents.

    I can almost always dig them up quickly- even weird old slang.

    I can’t find a mention of this term in old books, documents, newspapers, or cook books – I mean I only looked for about a minute, but that’s usually enough to locate it, if not learn what it means.

    This feels like an often used term they decided to throw in.

  7. Do you me fatback? If so it is like an extra fatty version of bacon, basically all fat with very little if any meat, usually used when a recipe calls for cooking something in bacon fat but not for using the bacon meat. But you could fry it up on it’s own.

  8. I’m just finishing rereading that series, too. They do eat a lot of bacon and pork when they’re out ranging, so I figured it was just a variation on “fatback”.

  14. From rural, north eastern NC and I’d say it is what we call fat back (or pork cracklins if it’s fried). Bacon-like cuts of primarily hard fat from the back of the pig.

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