Malaysian Bacon

What’s this? Pork? Bacon? From pig? Oink, oink, grrrunt grunt. Curly tail, a bit fat, snuffle snuffle? Bit of a stumpy waddle?

A quick-fire combination of my porcine charades and foolish mutterings drew me from George Town’s back streets, into the aromatic heat of my hesitant new friend’s kitchen.

I could wring out a story of a friendship formed from too few words and rendered with smiles and laughter, but I value my readership too much to string you along with drivel.

Bacon.That was the basis of this tasty conversation.

I say bacon, but it is best described as rolled pork. It was a surprising encounter with numerous large discs of pinkish-brown meat, obviously left to dry in the midday sun, which made me pause for a while. I switched on my travel blogger radar, and instantly thought, “My readers will bloody love this!”

I took a few shots, then followed a middle-aged man into a darkened room where he introduced me to a handful of staff. (I say introduced me, it was more like he stood me in the middle of the room so that I — an uncontrollably sweaty and alarmingly pale backpacker — became impossibly hard to ignore.)

The room was lit by a shaft of bright sunlight, which wove together the smoke of the griddle and the steam rising from a pot of boiling broth. An elderly lady silently flicked a blade through a mound of green vegetables, while a skinny yet firm man systematically flipped over strips of the pork.

You could have been mistaken for thinking a National Geographic crew were having a nap in the back room, having installed one of the more iconic images of Asia here in Penang’s cheerful capital.

The man at the griddle thrust forth a sizzling strip of the meat, and I obligingly grabbed it, folded it in half and slipped it into my mouth. My tongue became instantly drizzled in hot oil.

I’ll pause here for a second, so you can really enjoy this moment. Imagine every bacon-flavoured morsel you’ve ever come across, both at home and abroad. Imagine that small packet of Frazzles, or a sprinkling of bacon bits on your salad. Perhaps — like me — you once mistakenly ate barbecued pigs’ penis, or you’re a common connoisseur of gammon slabs.

The point is, that strip of pork I devoured was boastful. It bragged about its baconess. Not only did it ooze delicious bacon flavours, but it smelled how I imagine a Sunday morning inferno at a bacon factory would.

If you were to observe this impromptu tasting session — perhaps as the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’ — you wouldn’t have been mistaken for thinking I was far from impressed. After swallowing, I entered into the most pathetic reaction you could possibly align with this taste sensation.

I raised both eyebrows, and let out an obligatory “Mmmm…” followed by a weak smile. It wasn’t instinctive. It was rooted in the early stages of our Fifteen-Minute Friendship. I knew we couldn’t understand each other, and that we were in the No Man’s Land between our two cultures.

If I had exclaimed, “Fucking hell! That bacon is unbelievable, mate, I could kiss you…” and then, without thinking, enveloped this man in an over-friendly hug, I dare say he would raise his eyebrows and smile half-heartedly.

So I beat him to it.

In the course of all this unrequited excitement, I wrongly assumed that everywhere in George Town was an eatery. This was a perfectly acceptable assumption, given that everyone around me at this present time was either chopping, or cooking.

I tried in vain to communicate that I wanted to sit down and eat some fresh vegetables with a side plate of the chef’s finest bacon, but it quickly transpired that this was a ground-level operation, and probably supplying some troupe of local restaurateurs.

I began to ask if I could buy some to take away, but quickly resigned myself to the compensation of licking the inside of my mouth, as I followed the friendly Chinese Malaysian back out into the street like a sulking schoolboy.

I never saw this pork for sale anywhere in George Town, but if you’re ever passing through and see those unmistakable circles of rolled pork, be sure to pause a while, then find the nearest kitchen.

Tagged as: blogsherpa, george town, georgetown, malaysia, penang, peninsular malaysia west coast, pulau penang