Where should I eat in Toronto, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Peameal bacon is a preservation trick that became a delicacy. William Davies, an English pork curer who arrived in Toronto in 1854 and set up a stall in St. Lawrence Market, is credited with developing it: a boneless pork loin, wet-cured in brine, left unsmoked, and rolled in meal to protect its surface. The name records the original coating — ground dried yellow peas — which was replaced by cornmeal after the First World War, when refrigeration made the pea crust unnecessary. The sandwich is simply the loin sliced and griddled, stacked on a soft bun, and it is the form in which Toronto claims the dish.

The scale behind it explains the city's oldest nickname. The William Davies Company grew from that market stall into the largest pork exporter in the British Empire, processing nearly half a million hogs a year by the early 1900s — the trade that made Toronto "Hogtown." Carousel Bakery, on the South Market's main floor, is the stall most associated with the sandwich today, and its counter also sells two other threads of the city's baking: Ontario butter tarts and Portuguese custard tarts.

The rest of the Market eats like the census reads. Statistics Canada's 2021 count found 46.6 percent of the city's 2.79 million residents were born in another country — 1,286,145 people, with the Philippines, China and India the top three birthplaces — and the hall's 120-plus vendors mirror it: Caribbean beef patties and Ontario farmhouse cheese, Mennonite sausages and fresh pasta under one roof. Downstairs, Uno Mustachio serves the veal parmigiana sandwich, the cutlet-and-tomato-sauce stack that Toronto's Italian sandwich shops made a local standard.

At the Carousel counter the loin slices come off the grill in a stack, their cornmeal crust crisped gold at the edges, and go straight onto the bun while the line behind the counter watches the pile of raw, meal-dusted loins shrink in the display case.

There has been no pea in peameal bacon for over a century. The coating switched to cornmeal after the First World War, but the Victorian name stayed on the signs — so the city's signature sandwich is named after an ingredient it no longer contains.

• Breakfast — A peameal sandwich at Carousel Bakery as the Market opens; on Saturdays the hall is in full swing by 7 a.m.
• Lunch — Graze the South Market in courses: oysters at a fish counter, cheese from an Ontario dairy stall, a beef patty on the walk between them.
• Afternoon — A butter tart and coffee for the sweet course, eaten on the Market's Front Street edge before the halls close.

The Market keeps a market's week, not a mall's: it is closed on Mondays, and the South Market's day ends by early evening, so the signature sandwich is a breakfast-and-lunch project, not a dinner plan. Saturday, when the farmers' market fills the North building, is also the busiest — the Carousel line moves fast but it does form.

Order the sandwich plain the first time, with mustard if anything. The things-to-do question in this group starts its walking route at this same hall.