The Italians have pancetta, the Germans have speck, the Poles have boczek, the French have poitrine fume, but we have bacon.
Good bacon is simply one of the finest foods in any form on the face of the earth. The smell of frying bacon would tempt an anchorite, and possibly even a vegetarian, to err. 'There were Paddock's crisp sausages and fragrant shavings of bacon and shapely poached eggs' a hungry Richard Hannay fantasizes in John Buchan's The 39 Steps. 'Fragrant shaving of bacon'. 'Shapely poached eggs'. It's always been one of my favourite food quotes. From this I think we can deduce that he was referring to dried cured bacon here, not the coarse, vulgar and flabby wet cured bacon that oozes unpleasing white liquid all over the frying pan, and which never seems to get crisp, let alone fragrant.
It's actually very easy to make your own dry cured bacon. You just bury whichever cut you use - usually belly (aka streaky) or loin (aka back) although I'm fond of cheek (aka jowl; very rare) - in salt and spices of choice for 5-10 days to draw out much of the water on the pork used, remembering to pour off the water every now and then, before smoking it or hanging up in a cool place to dry further.
Wet cured bacon, on the other hand, means the flitches have been immersed in, or injected with, brine for a week or so to cure. This is a method preferred by mass production bacon industry, because the customer ends up buying a disproportionate amount of water with their bacon, and that's the white goo the rashers exude when they fry it.
I also like my bacon, streaky or back, to have some fat on it, so that after cooking, I have some splendid medium in which to fry eggs and bread. Incidentally, the fat of the Hungarian Mangalitza pigs is particularly delicious, while the old British Lop, Tamworth or Oxford Sandy Black are considered the finest bacon pigs.