Avoiding the Food Police

Before you’d get arrested by the food police for even mentioning bacon drippings, we ate it at every meal. It was for us what ghee (clarified butter) was to the Indian diet. It was essential.

It all started in the rural south when pork fat was the only cooking medium available for both frying and seasoning. I don’t know what Yankees used, but I bet it didn’t have the same nourishing, smoky flavor of bacon fat. You notice that I referred to it as bacon drippings. That is what all the southern cooks in my family have always called it. They had special little metal pots with a little tray sieve in it. They could pour the hot bacon fat directly into it. The little bits of cooked bacon in the pan would be caught in the sieve, with the hot fat dripping down into the pot below. I guess that’s why they called it bacon drippings.

We don’t eat that much bacon drippings anymore since the food police took over when we started making the correlation between pork fat and people dropping dead of strokes and heart attacks. Doctors, who have had one course in nutrition in their entire medical training, became those food police. If we ate bacon drippings, they would put our names on a most wanted list that hung in post offices all over rural Southwest Alabama and I’ve heard even as far away as Texas where our relatives went when they got in trouble with the law in Alabama and Mississippi. I understand the food police had a list for butter offenders nationwide, which they recently had to remove because somehow, we found out that butter is so much better for you than margarine which turns out to plastic.

Today I had steam fried potatoes and onions in bacon drippings. Now I have to turn myself in. However, as every good sinner knows, some things are worth it. The bacon drippings may be a more forbidden pleasure than adultery. I know that eating those potatoes was certainly pleasurable.

My grandmother used to make potatoes like those every time I would go spend the night with her. They are really a very simple dish. You heat the bacon drippings to the sizzling point in a heavy pan. Then you throw in as many diced or sliced potatoes and onions as you think you can eat at one sitting (they’re not as good left over). You turn down the heat, put on a lid and let them steam fry. Every so often you take a spatula and get up the parts that have browned to the pan. You do this several times during the approximately 20 minutes it takes to cook the potatoes over medium heat. I only cooked one potato and half an onion, because I had eaten a bacon and tomato sandwich earlier. That is how I came to have bacon drippings on hand. I threw away my bacon drippings container sometime in the last century or when I got divorced. I thought of my grandma’s potatoes and felt nostalgic.

They don’t call it comfort food for nothing. Those potatoes, sprinkled with the Creole seasoning instead of Maw maw’s liberal dousing of black pepper, topped with a light squirting of ketchup made a really great supper. The onions were transparent and the potatoes were custardy. Both were shiny with bacon drippings, even though I had drained and patted them with paper towels to assuage my guilt. I have rarely had such a soul satisfying meal recently. I understand why grassroots southern cooking is called soul food. Those potatoes, with their coating of politically incorrect bacon drippings filled up a place in my soul. There were to me, what the made lines were to Proust in “Remembrance of Things Past”.

Now if I must, I will give myself up to the food police. As I told you before, some things are worth it.