According to Kunal Vijayakar – Charcuterie worldwide is an ancient art that goes back at least 6,000 years and can be explained simply as the preservation of meat through curing, smoking and salting. Pork eating in India can be traced as far back as the 11th century though the demand for processed pork and meats dropped anchor with British troops stationed in India sometime around World War 1. The soldiers could not stomach our spices, curries and vegetables and yearned for food and meat that tasted like home, and so they turned to the Sonkars….
The Sonkars were a Hindu community from in and around central India. Legend says they were traditionally butchers who reared goats, but converted to rearing pigs and selling pork to prevent Aurangzeb from converting them to Islam. That was jolly for the British soldiers, who taught the Sonkars their recipes and the Sonkars in return started manufacturing ham, sausages and bacon, and earned the epithet Baconwallah. The Baconwallahs even travelled with the battalions, ensuring that the soldiers had a steady supply of processed meats.
Pork processing takes root in India
The 1940s and ’50s saw rapid urbanization and India’s big cities had enough Christians, Parsis, Anglo-Indians, foreigners, five-star hotels, and ship chandlers with an appetite for pork products to warrant a whole pork-processing factory. Thus, the Emprassa Sausage Factory, along with Shalimar Cold Storage and Farm Products, were born. Large-scale refrigeration was still a predicament and so the first pork slaughtering and processing unit in Mumbai came up next to Arthur Road Jail, with an ice factory for storage right across the road. By 1968, the Government of India under the aegis of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, thought it worthwhile to set up four bacon factories across the country. And in 1971, the iconic MAFCO or Maharashtra Agro and Fruit Processing Corporation was launched to market and distribute products like ham, sausages, bacon, luncheon meat and salami – Kunal Vijayakar