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And it was not until the present generation - and Jim Nueske's devishly effective country-boy salesmanship - that the Nueske brand (pronounced NOO-ski) spread across the nation. Nueske Hillcrest Farms raises no pigs of its own. This is dairy country. Instead, it buys pork bellies, the fatty flaps that lie across the pig's ribs, from hogs raised to its specifications in Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Canada. But not in Wisconsin. "Here in Wisconsin," said Jim Nueske, who was dressed in a baseball cap and a work shirt emblazoned with Green Bay Packers logos. "We're meatheads among cheese heads." The hogs whose bellies are bound for Nueske are fed a larger-than-normal percentage of barley, along with corn, and are slaughtered at certain weights, Mr. Nueske explained, to minimize fattiness without destroying the taste. The brine in which the bellies are soaked is simple - sugar, as little salt as possible and several sodium compounds, among them sodium nitrate, which are included as preservatives and flavorings. Sodium nitrate content is regulated by the Agriculture Department, and Nueske bacon contains less residual nitrorosamines than allowed by the U.S.D.A. It could be eliminated altogether, but nitrates provide some of the characteristic bacon flavor, and the only nitrite-free bacon I have sampled tasted more like roast pork. The slabs of bacon spend about 24 hours in the brine, as much as 1,800 pounds to each yellow plastic vat. But the key to the flavor and consistency of Nueske bacon, unlike some country bacons, which are cured with dry rubs, lies in the smokehouse and not in the curing tanks. Most bacon is smoked in stainless-steel machines, fired with sawdust, that do the job in four to six hours; Nueske uses 16 steel-lined concrete-block smokehouses, heated by open fires of apple wood logs, and keeps the meat over the coals 20 to 24 hours. The bacon goes in on special racks fitted with wheels, 80 sides at a time, about 16,000 pounds a day. It emerges lean and cordovan-colored, ready to be hand-trimmed and then machine-sliced, roughly 18 one-eight-inch slices to a pound. "The point is to render most of the fat here and not in the frying pan," Mr. Nueske said as he led me on a tour of the plant. "For that, and for maximum flavor, you have to finish at very high temperatures." A pound of most run-of-the-mill raw bacon produces as little as a quarter to a third of a pound of cooked bacon; Nueske shoots for about three-quarters of a pound, he said. The boom in bacon sales has come from its use in sandwiches, salads, soups, pasta dishes and the like, which put a premium, of course, on flavor. That has opened a lot of doors for Mr. Nueske, starting with grocers and restaurateurs in Milwaukee and Minneapolis in the late 1970's. "I'm selling a flavoring, not bacon as such," he told me. "That's my sales technique. I drop a pound of bacon off, ask the guy to try it. I don't mention price - half the time I don't know the current price - and tell them I'll be back to check with them in a week. Then I have them. Almost from the start, he hooked enough customers that 20 years ago the Nueske brothers' and their families mortgaged their houses, their cars and their weekend cottages to build a big new smoking plant. "I'm going to give you an opportunity to fail," their cheerful banker told them. Now, from this little town of 1,140 people, Nueske bacon is shipped to restaurants like the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, Balthaszar and An American Place in New York, Commander's Palace in New Orleans, Clio and Olives in Boston, and Pinot in Los Angeles. It goes into everything from quiche Lorraine to wine-based sauces for eggs and poultry. Availability through retail channels is spotty, and in the New York Area, so far nonexistent. But direct-mail shipments, based until three years ago in a garage, have taken off and Nueske is now sending out a million catalogs four times a year.