Speck can refer to a number of European cured pork products, typically salted and air-cured and often lightly smoked but not cooked. In Germany, speck is pickled pork fat with or without some meat in it. In the Netherlands and Flanders, in Dutch, spek [sic] is bacon. Throughout much of the rest of Europe and parts of the English-speaking culinary world, speck is usually South Tyrolean speck, a type of Italian smoked ham. The term speck became part of popular parlance only in the eighteenth century and replaced the older term bachen, a cognate of bacon.^{[citation needed]}

There are a number of regional varieties of speck, including:

In Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, in which bacon (like all pork) is forbidden as unkosher, "speck" commonly refers to the subcutaneous fat on a brisket of beef. It is a particular speciality of delis serving Montreal-style smoked meat, where slices of the fatty cut are served in sandwiches on rye bread with mustard, sometimes in combination with other, leaner cuts.