Food & drink

A 2002 cookbook put bacon in dessert before anyone asked

This is the story of a cookbook built around a single, slightly absurd premise: that bacon makes almost everything better. Portland food writer Sara Perry wrote it at her editor's suggestion, despite worrying there wouldn't be enough bacon recipes to fill a book. She found her way in by remembering how much she liked honey-baked ham, which led her to start pairing bacon with sugar, and from there she realized bacon could season almost anything, sharpening both sweet and salty flavors. Published in 2002 and later translated into French, the book opens with notes on bacon's history and storage before offering seventy recipes across nine chapters covering breakfast, salads, pasta, desserts and party food, including oddities like a bacon crunch for ice cream and a bacon-infused pie crust.

Critics largely enjoyed the book's enthusiasm and its photography, and it sold briskly, moving 30,000 copies in its first month. Reviewers at papers from Denver to Pittsburgh praised its dessert recipes especially, with dishes like bacon brittle and a brown sugar-bacon fruit crisp singled out as highlights, and one chef even adapted Perry's maple sundae into his own ice cream creation. Not every review was glowing: the Toronto Star found the recipe selection uninspired and the collection too slim compared with other bacon-focused cookbooks, even while conceding it was good value. Others noted the book arrived alongside a broader cultural shift, as the rise of the Atkins diet made high-meat, low-carb eating fashionable and helped fuel bacon's growing popularity.

The book is generally treated as a niche title, but one that captured and helped extend bacon's unlikely rise from breakfast staple to trendy ingredient. Two of its recipes were later anthologized in a roundup of the year's best American recipes, and other food writers cited it alongside similar bacon-themed titles as evidence of a wider obsession taking hold. Several years after publication, commentators noted that bacon had become as fashionable as chocolate or olive oil, and the book kept getting referenced as an early marker of that trend well into the next decade. Even a British newspaper, writing a decade later about renewed interest in pork, pointed back to Perry's work as part of that story.

The book was translated into French and published in Montreal in 2004, two years after its American release.

Read the whole of Everything Tastes Better with Bacon on Wikipedia

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