Bacon and Potato Bread

There is no crumb in this sandwich at any point, and that absence is the whole of it. The carrier is a farl of potato bread, a flat soft round of cooked potato beaten with flour and a knob of fat and griddled plain, and across Northern Ireland it is a fixed part of the cooked breakfast. It goes into the pan once the bacon is out, into the fat the rashers have left. There it firms, takes colour and salt across both faces, and comes out a griddled slab rather than the pale doughy thing it went in as. Then it folds round the bacon and gets eaten in the hand. No roll, no loaf, no slice of leavened bread anywhere near it.

The no-crumb point is worth pressing, because it inverts how a breakfast roll works. A bap is built to draw rendered fat up through an open crumb. Potato bread has no crumb in that sense and almost no absorbency, so it cannot soak grease the way a roll does. It carries the fat on its fried surface instead, which is exactly why it is cooked in that fat and not dry. A griddled farl is dense and faintly chewy, a little sweet from the potato, and it sits firm under a bite where a soft roll would yield. So the texture runs against a normal breakfast fold: not crisp bacon against a giving crumb, but crisp bacon against a second firm, griddled layer, two solid things meeting with nothing soft set between them.

It can come apart at either side of the pan. A farl griddled too briefly stays pale and pasty in the centre and hands back the doughy texture frying was meant to drive off; held too long it dries to a hard, cracking biscuit that shears when it is folded. The bacon has its own window: pulled short it sheds soft fat with no firm rim, and against an already firm farl the bite has nothing to break it; taken too far it goes brittle and snaps loose from a carrier with no give to grip it. There is no butter step, so the seasoned fat on the farl's surface is the only thing binding bacon to bread, and a farl griddled dry in a clean pan leaves the two layers reading as separate dry things in the mouth.

Off the griddle it is hot enough to pass from hand to hand. The fried farl smells of potato and caught fat, rounder and earthier than the salt-smoke lifting off the rasher. A thin crust on the surface gives a faint resistance, then the inside is soft and dense and warm, closer to a thick potato cake than to any bread. The bacon lands as the firmer, saltier, chewier layer, the one note of real contrast in a fold that is otherwise soft against soft. A runny egg yolk, if one was added, breaks somewhere in here and slicks the whole thing. Eaten straight off the heat it holds together; the farl has no waterproofed crumb to keep it whole once it has stood and gone cold, so nobody lets it stand.

It belongs to the Ulster fry and the Northern Irish breakfast table, and the language around it is regional rather than national. A cafe plates the farl beside soda farl, bacon, sausage, egg and black pudding; asking for it folded round the bacon as a sandwich is a one-handed route through the same plate, the kind of thing thrown together at home the morning after. Across the water the method is identical but the word flags the place: a Scot griddles a tattie scone for the same job, and the two carriers are not interchangeable to anyone raised on one of them. Potato bread is the Ulster term and the Ulster shape, sold fresh off the griddle, by the packet, in shops across the province under bakery names like Ormo.

The variations are the rest of the fry and the carriers that run alongside it. A fried egg with a soft yolk is the usual addition, the yolk doing the lubricating work the missing butter would. Soda farl is the other Northern Irish griddle base for the same rashers, a flour-and-buttermilk bread rather than a potato one, and it earns a listing of its own apart from the potato fold. The Scottish tattie scone holds bacon the same way across the water, a different region's fried potato carrier. The closest non-griddle relative is the plain bacon bap, routing the identical rashers through a soft leavened roll, and the gap between the two comes down to a crumb that soaks fat against a farl that carries it on its skin. Each holds its own page.

Origin and history

No kitchen, town or year can be set to the act of folding bacon into a fried farl. It is vernacular Ulster food, made wherever potato bread and a frying pan met, and the honest move is to date the carrier rather than invent a date for the sandwich. Potato bread in Ireland is older than the leavened soda bread it now sits beside on the breakfast plate; it was being made well before the famine of 1845, when potato was the staple a household with little wheat stretched into bread.

The carrier leaves a documentary trail the sandwich does not. Potato bread is set down as an Ulster country food in print: Florence Irwin's collection of Ulster recipes, The Cookin' Woman, published in 1949, records the griddle potato farl as a standing part of the regional kitchen, and the bread was a fixture long before that book wrote it down. Belfast and provincial bakeries have sold it farl-fresh across the same stretch.

The fold of bacon into that farl leaves no paper at all, because it was never a recipe, only a use. The most concrete thing to hold onto is the name of the bread. A round of potato dough is cut into four triangles before griddling, and the word for one triangle, farl, descends from the Scots fardel, a fourth part.

That word carried into the north of Ireland with the Ulster-Scots settlement, the same movement of people that planted the closely related tattie scone over in Scotland.