Wicked, Wicked Good...

I have a special affection for my coffee can filled with bacon drippings. I love it for the endless possibilities it represents for creating something tasty. I cook with them, infuse bourbon with them. I've considered using them for lip balm, but I haven't gone that far. Not yet.

Tonight I used them to make mayonnaise. I'm blaming Ari Weinzweig for this. He reveals the recipe in his book, Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon. It takes but a few minutes and no fancy, esoteric ingredients. The results are fit for schmearing on just about anything--an omelette, a baked potato, a piece of fish. It's also good eaten right off the spoon--or your finger. If you happen to have food to put it on, that's great, but if you don't, it shouldn't stop you from enjoying a taste.

As Himself shot this picture we agreed that the bacon mayo looked like hummus, which led me to conclude that a Southern version of hummus is in order, one that calls for blackeyed peas instead of garbanzo beans and bacon fat instead of olive oil. 

I probably should leave this idea alone, but I do love playing with my food. I think I'll sleep on it. And if I do decide to make Southern hummus, you'll be the first to know.

Porq-à-choux

A yummy blend of pork, apples, sage and cheddar cheese. I think I have a new canapé to trot out for the next party. I just won't mention that secret ingredient. Can I count on your discretion?

Recently I spotted a news item about chefs all over the US who are engaged in a pork-off, to see who can come up with the most imaginative uses for swine.

The list of their experiments is dazzling and comprehensive, from cheek to belly to backside. I was inspired. But I had to take a different tack, since I couldn't realistically dig a pit in my backyard and smoke/roast/lovingly fire up an entire hog (not today, anyway). I decided I could at least do something with pork product that I've never done before. I decided to go for a pig juice application...fat.

So I substituted bacon drippings for butter in a pâte à choux recipe, reducing the amount of sugar by half but otherwise hewing to the basic choux recipe. Then I piped out cream puffs and eclairs and even a pig!

Silly, but I just have to show him off, the original porq-à-choux! ("Cabbage pig?" Hmm, let me rethink that.)

The resulting puffs don't scream, "Hey there, I taste like pork!" but they carry a subtle, smoky porcine essence. And of course, they have a luscious mouth feel.

For the filling I made a chunky applesauce from granny smith apples, with a sprinkling brown sugar, some chopped fresh sage leaves and a wee slosh of that lovely pork fat-infused bourbon (see Bacon-Laced Booze Bliss).Then I stirred in some crumbled bacon, filled the porky puffs with the mixture, and melted a little sharp cheddar cheese over the top.

The result was a great blend of flavors, with none overpowering any other. Sweet and salty and smoky and porky. Those ingredients played together like the good friends they've always been.

A lot of my kitchen experiments turn out to be one-shot things, fun to try, but I'll never do them again. This time I've found myself a keeper!

Bacon-Laced Booze Bliss

Ever since my pal, Chuck (he's about to officially acquire the hyphenated name Chuck-of-Gumbo-Pages-Fame) introduced me to bacon-infused bourbon, I've been itching to give it a try. I'm not much of a bourbon drinker, but he recently made me an Old-Fashioned with his bacony bourbon, and I didn't execute the taste-and-give-it-away maneuver I typically do with drinks made of amber spirits. Its porky aura beguiled and seduced me and held my interest through to the bottom of the glass.

So of course I had to make my own. Being a true Southerner, I keep a coffee can of bacon drippings at the ready for frying and flavoring and for just this kind of adventure. Incidentally, these drippings come from the really good smoked bacon I spirit away from Tennessee in my luggage when I return from home. None of that dreary, mass-produced bacon for me or my coffee can!)

Mmmmmm, pure bacon drippings.
I wonder if you could read the porky dreck in bacon drippings
the way a fortune teller reads tea leaves? Sorry, I digress...

So last night I followed Chuck's advice and put about a tablespoon of bacon drippings (okay, okay, I used more) into a large jar with 750 ml. of Buffalo Trace, which he suggested as a great bourbon to pork up. Every hour for the next few hours I gave it a vigorous shake (I have a great action shot of Andy doing this, but he forbade me to include it... grrr...).

The bacon drippings work their magic. Just a few more hours to go...

Then I stashed the mixture in the fridge overnight so that the fat would harden for easy separation. At least the waiting isn't too long with this concoction, like it is when you're making most other infusions. Still, when it comes to smoky pork, any wait is a long one.

Chilling the combo allowed the bacon drippings to solidify, so I could easily
filter them out through a sieve lined with a couple of layers of cheesecloth.

This morning I strained the bourbon back into its original bottle and plastered onto said bottle a bacon strip bandaid (courtesy of Archie McPhee) to denote which has the essence de bacon.

Ta-dah! Bacon-infused bourbon.

Now the fun begins as Andy and I hit the lab, a.k.a. the kitchen, to see what sorts of cocktails we can dream up using our lovely new porky friend. First is the Old Fashioned. This should go great with my bacon walnut fudge.

Bacon-infused bourbon. It's not just for breakfast anymore!

Giving Thanks For the Food of the Gods

Since we're West Coast transplants, we typically try to find others like ourselves who aren't surrounded by family here and invite them over for Thanksgiving. This time we hosted Peter and Julie, an Australian couple, people we met at church who had experienced Thanksgiving fare the previous Sunday. So we decided to treat them to a Southern American feast, since Southern cuisine is one of the few distinctive cuisines in this country and one our Aussie friends had never sampled.

We fired up the smoker out back and laid in the dry-rubbed pork spare ribs for a long, slow cooking and smoking over charcoal and hickory chips. Pork fat carried over into preparation of collard greens (garnished with slices of hard-boiled egg), black-eyed peas and cornbread, all of which are much tastier when made with bacon drippings.

We also had ambrosia, with its delicate shreds of coconut and fresh orange slices. This dish, which should never contain miniature marshmallows and which should always be served in a lovely cut-glass bowl, was traditionally a special wintertime treat, rare and exotic in rural Tennessee. And sun tea, with a mildness that only a slow steep on a sunny day can provide. For dessert we had pecan pie and homemade vanilla ice cream.

(The only thing that would have made this meal better would be if I could have scored a jar of my Cousin Lelabelle's wonderful rosy relish. I finally got her to shake loose the recipe after I'd lived in Los Angeles long enough for her to realize I'd never make it back in Tennessee and steal her tasty thunder. Problem is, I have a devil of a time growing tomatoes in this deserty backyard of mine, so it's really difficult to get the green tomatoes required of this lovely relish.)

Buying the ingredients in Los Angeles bumps the price up, but essentially, this is basic Southern fare, what country dwellers had on hand. Pork ribs were some of the leftover bits from the better cuts the wealthier people got. Black-eyed peas and collard greens you grew in your own garden. Cornbread was, well, cornbread, cooked with hot bacon drippings in your granny's well-seasoned cast iron skillet. Even the pie would be made with pecans from your own trees. (These days I get mine at the Toluca Lake Trader Joe's, a long way from the pecan thicket that separates our farm from the main road.)

There was much to be thankful for on Thanksgiving this year: A cozy house with a roof that doesn't leak, thanks to the work of Andy and our friend, Jeff (someone else to be thankful for), who repaired it just before torrential rains began. The rains themselves, which rehydrated our desperately dry yard. Lovely new friends from Down Under.

And feasting on this simple fare made me thankful that good food doesn't have to be either expensive or fussy.

Ambrosia may be "food of the gods," but to my thinking, they'd be clamoring for those smoked pork ribs, too. And they'd have to fight me for them!

Home again, home again, piggity pig

It’s good to be back home in Memphis. As I stepped from the plane onto the jetway this evening, two scents blended in my nose—jet fumes and barbecue. Right next to my gate was an Interstate Barbecue restaurant. If my family hadn't been waiting to have dinner with me, I’d have just rolled my bag right in there and gotten myself a healthy dose of pork barbecue before ever leaving the airport. Thanks for the welcome home, Neely family!

The next few days will involve spending time with family and friends, enjoying the old haunts and sighing over the lovely green Tennessee landscape that’s so very Ireland in its uncountable shades of green. And it will involve making sure to have all those foods that nourished my past—catfish, country ham, pork barbecue, cornbread, fried chicken and a variety of vegetables cooked in bacon drippings.
This field, the view from the back of our family farmhouse, has housed its share of hogs and cattle over the years, as well as the current corn crop. There we've raised both food to eat and food to sell. I've caught innumerable catfish in its pond--and we've even gigged a frog or two there for those lean, meaty legs!

Of course, when I head back to Los Angeles in 10 days, the last thing I will smell as I board the plane will probably be the same, a blend of jet fumes and barbecue. And then I’ll say, thanks for the farewell, Neely family!

p.s. I’d like to apologize to Rob Reiner for staring at him on the flight to Indianapolis today. I wasn’t staring at him because he’s Rob Reiner, but rather because I was thinking, “Gee, that man looks just like Rob Reiner.” Then later I heard someone say, “Yeah, Rob Reiner’s on this flight!” And then I knew why the man I was staring at looked so much like Rob Reiner. What an uncanny resemblance . . .

But is it authentic?

Since moving to California from Tennessee a decade ago, I’ve railed long and loud about the crap-ass cornbread they serve out here. California cornbread looks and tastes rather like cake—large, pale blocks of dry, crumbly stuff that takes an awful lot of iced tea to wash down. And it contains enough sugar to classify it as a dessert. I don’t want it anywhere near the black-eyed peas. It just ain’t right.

Tennessee cornbread is thin and flat, made in an iron skillet with bacon drippings and just a hint of sugar, used in the same way you’d add a sprinkling of salt while making your cake or pie. The skillet bestows a fine crispiness that gives way in each bite to the luxurious heft provided by the addition of genuine animal fat.
The cornbread of my growing up years--and what I make now--is golden on top, with a brown crunchy bottom that you can only get when you make it in cast iron.

Because this is the type of cornbread I grew up with and what’s authentic for me, I tend to measure all other cornbread by the Tennessee yardstick. The best cornbread in California is what I make in my own kitchen, with my own aged iron skillet, my coffee can full of bacon drippings and my taste memory of all the cornbread of all my years before leaving the South.

Apparently a lot of people indulge in cornbread snobbery--not just me. Some insist it must be made specifically with either white or yellow cornmeal, that it must have flour or a handful of chopped jalapeno peppers or even a can of creamed corn tossed into the mix. And if you don’t make it the way they do, then it’s NOT the real stuff.

Author and storyteller Crescent Dragonwagon makes a good point about the concept of authentic cornbread. I attended her presentation on the subject during the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals recently, and she gave the rundown on corn’s history as part of the Mesoamerican diet waaay before the Europeans showed up. People have been making bread from ground corn for centuries, and my way of doing the job is but one of many. As she wisely pointed out, the original cornbread was the TORTILLA!

So to all those Californians whose cornbread I’ve disparaged, I apologize for the crap-ass remark. But I’d still rather eat my own.

Nectar of the porcine gods

One of the most prized possessions in my kitchen, right up there with my grandmother’s bowls, my well-seasoned iron skillets and my red, outboard motor-sized KitchenAid mixer, is my coffee can filled with bacon drippings. Both a food AND a condiment, bacon makes everything taste better—even more bacon! And the drippings perform double duty as both a cooking fat and a seasoning. What a way to multitask!

Each time I dig into that can, I reflect on the layers of hardened drippings like I would the rings of a tree. With each layer I scratch through I wonder, what was going on the day I poured in this layer? and this layer? and this layer?

I may not live in the rural South anymore, and I may be a big city girl, hobnobbing with the occasional high-profile chef and food celebrity, but I cling to my can of bacon drippings as an anchor to my cultural and culinary past—and as a way to enjoy a darned fine meal. None of that tofu-based faux bacon stuff. You’ve got to have your standards, right?