Allan Benton (Benton’s bacon)

Benton’s was started in 1947 by the late Albert H. Hicks, a dairy farmer who began curing and selling country hams out of a building in his backyard. Allan Benton, a former high school guidance counselor, took over the business in 1973 and relocated it to the present location on US Hwy 411 near Madisonville, TN. Out of this modest, painted block building, Allan Benton and his employees have honed the dry-curing of hams and bacon into a culinary art and have catapulted the products from a simple breakfast mainstay into the world of gourmet cooking, where they have been praised for their characteristic flavor. Most recently, Benton’s prosciutto, a domestic version of the renowned prosciutto specialty hams of Parma, Italy, has grown rapidly in popularity and has been featured in a broad spectrum of high-end restaurants, as well as in a number of magazines and other food publications.

Herb Eckhouse (La Quercia)

Herb and Kathy Eckhouse founded La Quercia and work in all aspects of the business–selecting and buying pork, salting, trimming, and handling hams and leading the small group of dedicated staff who participate in the production. “We started La Quercia to create premium quality American prosciutto. Our appreciation for prosciutto grew out of the three and a half years we lived in Parma, Italy, prosciutto’s area of origin. Our ambition to create our own came from our desire to take the bounty that surrounds us in Iowa to its highest expression. We seek to contribute to the growth of premium artisan-made American foods by offering fine quality, dry cured meats—and Iowa with its abundance is the natural place to do this. We work especially closely with our smaller, farmer-owned suppliers, Becker Lane, Eden Farms, and Heritage Acres. It is not sustainable agriculture if they go out of business, so instead of commodity market based pricing, we work on a negotiated, “fair trade” style price.

Nick Spencer (Spencer’s)

Nick Spencer moved to America a few years back for a very special lady. Longing for the classic flavors and tastes of home, he launched “Spencer’s” to make Jolly Posh British & Irish Foods. Spencer’s premium products include two flavors of British & Irish style bangers (sausages) and a delicious dry-cured bacon. These authentic, artisan products reflect Nick’s heritage, and are lovingly and locally made in Chicago to time-honored, traditional recipes using fine, fresh ingredients. He’s thrilled to share them with you and sure you’ll be “chuffed to bits!”
Spencer’s Back Bacon is hand-trimmed, hand-rubbed and dry-cured to an authentic British recipe. This specialty bacon is made using pork loin, in a dry-cure process that takes 10 days – that’s a long time to wait for a decent slice of bacon, but it creates a lean and truly unique flavor. Well worth it!
Spencer’s Traditional Pork, and Pork and Herb Bangers are made to authentic recipes using prime cuts of succulent pork, and lightly seasoned with a select blend of high quality herbs, spices and breadcrumbs. This ensures the right balance of flavors, texture, size and shape. All the bangers are stuffed into natural casings, contain no nitrates, nitrites or MSG, and are made with pork raised without hormones. As the saying goes, “you get what you pay for!”

Megan Dorsch (Nueske’s)

Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Meats has been around since 1933, the year that the company’s founder, R.C. Nueske, began peddling his tasty wares from the back of the family automobile to make ends meet. The Nueske family brought their smoking techniques from the Old World and began smoking their meats, here in the U.S., way back in the 1800’s. In the years during The Great Depression, R.C. began selling the family’s prized hams and bacon. He traveled through the resort towns of northern Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota with his goods and even though money was tight for everyone, people were still willing to pay for R.C.’s fine quality meats that could bring people together.  Word of his delicious smoked meats spread and eventually R.C. had a full-fledged meat shop in Wittenberg, Wisconsin, the Nueske family’s home town.

Today, thanks to R.C.’s sons Bob & Jim’s careful learning from their father, Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Meats is the respected specialty meat company that it is today. We are proud to continue to use the same special slow-smoking methods today that R.C.’s family used in the beginning. Our bacon spends a minimum of 24 hours in the smokehouse over glowing embers of Wisconsin Applewood.  Nueske’s is known for the signature flavor of our Applewood Smoked Meats – rich, smoky, and sweet.

Nueske’s is third-generation family owned & operated.

Megan Dugan Dorsch has been with Nueske’s for almost seven years and began by working in the mail order call center and then moving to inside sales, servicing Nueske’s wholesale and foodservice customers. Today, she’s Nueske’s marketing manager and a top-notch taste-tester. Megan is a Wisconsin native who eats her fair share of great cheese and bacon and also devours music and reading material.

Molly Stevens

Molly Stevens is a food writer, editor and cooking teacher living in Northern Vermont. Her cookbook All About Braising: The Art of Uncomplicated Cooking (WW Norton) won a 2005 James Beard Foundation award and an International Association of Culinary Professionals award. Food & Wine magazine listed the book as one of the top 10 cookbooks of 2004. Molly’s articles and recipes appear regularly in Fine Cooking magazine where she is a contributing editor. She also contributes to Bon Appétit, Saveur, The Oregonian, and Edible Green Mountains. Her recipes and tips have also appeared in Everyday with Rachel Ray, Eating Well, Real Simple, Yankee, Drinks, and Real Food magazines.

Molly has been described in the New York Times Book Review as “a beautifully clear writer who likes to teach”. Classically trained as a chef in France, Molly has directed programs and taught at the French Culinary Institute, New England Culinary Institute, and L’Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne in Burgundy, France and Venice, Italy. She continues to travel and teach cooking classes across the country. Molly served on the board of directors for the Vermont Fresh Network from 2003 to 2008. She is a 2009 fellow in the Environmental Leadership Program.

Sharon and Meghan Meehan (Ham I Am)

Sharon and Meghan join us from Ham I Am, the folks who bring us the incredible Arkansas Peppered Bacon that we’ve been loving and selling at the Deli and at zingermans.com for a while (try it on the #31 at the Deli or on the Jen’s Pimento Party). Sharon got her start in the cured pork world in 1986 when, after moving to Texas with her husband and four young children, she was looking to earn some extra money for Christmas. She remembered the fabulous cracked-pepper-encrusted, no-water-added hickory smoked hams she’d had while visiting friends in Arkansas and began bringing small loads of them back to Texas in the family’s Volkswagen Rabbit to sell to neighbors at local bazaars. The first Christmas proved to be a huge success, but Sharon never wanted to do it again. She recalls, “My house would spring into business the minute the kids left for schoo, and then it would be back together before dinner. I’d have to vacuum up all those foam peanuts. It was crazy.” Her customers wouldn’t let her quite, and over the years, the company has moved out of the home office and expanded to ship all over the country.

In 2005, Sharon’s eldest daughter Meghan, who’d had a love for specialty food since her first Fancy Food Show at the age of 16, officially joined the ranks of Ham I Am! Today, Sharon’s heart and soul are very much part of the business, but Meghan oversees daily operations and carries on the family tradition.

“Interestingly, one bacon in our testing. . .was judged so vastly superior to the other bacons, with such a different taste, taht most tasters put it in its own category. This was Ham I Am’s Ozark Trails Bacon.” –Cooks Illustrated

Jan Longone

Jan Longone directs The Longone Center for American Culinary Research at the University of Michigan. It is increasingly recognized as a premier collection for the study of culinary Americana. The Center consists of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive augmented by the rich Americana holdings of the Clements Library, catalogued for their culinary content. Shaped by the donation of a library organized over a forty-year period by Jan and her husband Dan, the Center possesses a coherent collection intended to define the American culinary experience.

Jan will share with us the unique place that bacon holds in American culinary history and show off some of the rare and wonderful archives that make up the holdings at the Longone Center.