Dry-curing pork has been a way of life for Allan Benton. In 1973, he took over the small operation from Albert Hicks, a dairy farmer who started the operation in his Madisonville backyard the year Benton was born, 1947.

Benton, a country boy through and through, felt compelled to take it over when he heard Hicks had retired at 68.

“I would not be where I am today if it were not for Albert Hicks,” Benton says. “Three or four months after he quit, I learned he had stopped making the hams and bacon and I asked him if he would lease me that old building – and he did. I ran it literally in his backyard for a while.

“I’ve been making hams and bacon ever since,” he says.

But these aren’t ordinary hams and bacon. Benton’s products, still produced in Madisonville, about 45 miles southwest of Knoxville, are being served in some of the nation’s finest restaurants.

Search the New York Times website and you’ll find a dozen mention of Benton’s products in restaurant reviews and food blogs. You also will find a recipe for a cocktail called the “Benton’s Old-Fashioned,” an “instantly cultish concoction, which infuses bourbon with Allan Benton’s Tennessee bacon.”

Esquire magazine proclaimed Benton’s the “world’s best bacon” in 2009. Gourmet’s John T. Edge says Benton’s has “some of the most flavorful ham and bacon we’ve tasted in years.”

Atlanta’s One Flew South Restaurant and Sushi Bar offers a Benton’s Bacon Roll. There is an “I Love Benton’s Bacon” Facebook page.

Oprah loves it, and so do the Obamas. But it wasn’t always that popular.

“I honestly thought I was going to starve to death the first 25 years I ran it,” Benton says. “It only started to improve when chefs began to use it.”

He estimates he sold 30,000 bacon bellies and 14,000 hams last year.

“I don’t think people realize what a pathetic, hole-in-the-wall operation we are,” he jokes.

Want to fry some for Sunday morning breakfast? It’s available locally at Mitchell’s Deli, 1402 McGavock in Inglewood, and at various markets around Knoxville via A&B Distributors.

Online orders are backed up for several weeks.

So what makes Benton’s so coveted? Slow cured with salt, brown sugar and black and red pepper, the hams are usually aged around 9-10 months and as long as two years.

“When I first got into it I wrote to every university in the south trying to share information about what I was trying to do,” Benton says. “I set a goal for myself early on that I wanted to make a product that is just as good as our European cousins or anybody else. And with those lofty goals we set to working and refining to improve our products.”

Even great products need a boost, and it seems word of mouth is just what Benton needed to make his product the darling of food writers and four-star chefs.

“I don’t have any idea why people are fascinated with what I do,” Benton says. “We just take hams and I use my original family recipe on them. We age them a lot longer than some folks do, and I think that is part of the secret.

“Our bacon is certainly not for everyone. It is a very intense flavor of bacon with a pronounced smoke flavor. I have eaten this cured pork my entire life. This wasn’t fancy food. This was just sustenance for poor, Appalachian hillbillies.”

Humble and modest, Allan swears it is not his product that reigns supreme, but the chefs who know just how to use it. And use it they do, all over the country.

“They can use the stuff in ways that really highlights the product,” he says of Art Smith at Chicago’s Table 52, Tom Colicchio at New York’s Craft and Sean Brock at Charleston’s Husk.

Locally, Benton’s has made its way into a number of tasty dishes across Nashville.

“We feel so incredibly lucky that these chefs choose us,” Benton says. “Now, we make a pretty good product, but the creativity of these young chefs has elevated our product and I am being honest. It is the creativity of the chefs that we owe a debt to.”

Tandy Wilson at Nashville’s City House, who is pretty much on top of the pork game right now, claims it’s the other way around.

“To me, what makes things here good is that we are able to procure beautiful product,” he says. “Then we just treat it very simplistically and get it to the plate.”

More people associate local food with top quality and are interested in where it came from. Eating food that may only be a few hours old is great, too.

“I think people are really beginning to pay attention to quality products and locally grown products,” Benton says.

If Benton ever decides to retire from making bacon, he hopes one of his three children, all in the medical field, will take over.

If not, food would still be a way of life for him, inspired by the chefs who savor his product.

“I want to be making bacon when I am 85 or 90, if I live to be 85 or 90,” he says. “But if I could slow down and take time, I would really like to go to culinary school.

“Not that I want to work 80 hours a week as a cook. But just for the fun of it.”