The Bacon Grease Gospel

By Bobby Neal Winters

A short time ago, my wife made us some BLT sandwiches. Well, as I don’t eat iceberg lettuce, mine was a BT sandwich, but I digress. There was bacon grease leftover in the pan afterwards, and by morning it had cooled and congealed.

Every morning, I fry myself two eggs.  I usually use vegetable oil, but there--right on the stove top--was the congealed, nitrite-full fat of the bacon-beast.  I took a big spoon and ladled it out into the cast-iron skillet that I use to fry my morning eggs.  I was, of course, careful to miss the kitty footprints that were in it; there are always kitty footprints in it.

The results were delightful.  I was able to stretch out the bacon grease for a few mornings.  

Life is good.

Many of you are shocked. You are saying that he has fallen off the weight-control wagon. That I have backslidden.

No.  Not yet. Not because of that.

Whether you gain or lose weight depends upon the number of total calories you consume.  There might be other reasons you shouldn’t eat bacon fat, but this is not one of them.

Every group has its own type of fat.  Our Mediterranean brothers and sisters have olive oil; the dairy farmers in Wisconsin have butter; the Jewish community in New York City has chicken fat,schmaltz I think it’s called.

Bacon grease is the fat of my people, and we are a People who know about fat first hand.

On my mother’s stove there stood a Crisco can.  The one thing that I never saw in that Crisco can was Criso.  The store-bought Crisco was always quickly used up--for what I don’t know--and the can was then put to permanent use for storing bacon drippings.

You fry bacon; you eat it; you save the drippings in the can. After the grease was used, it was alway carefully retrieved.  At least as much as hadn’t soaked into the food was retrieved.  So some of it was used over, and over, and over. One might wonder whether it would eventually polymerise or develop into a living thing.  One might wonder, but one oughtn’t if one wants to sleep well.

You might have a nightmare about the contents of a Crisco can terrorizing and isolated Oklahoma town like the movie “Tremors” or something.

I submit that the saving of bacon grease is at the very least educational and at most a means of grace. 

We learn not to waste: the pig died for us to have the bacon, so it is a duty upon us to put it to as much use as possible. We learn the accumulation of small things builds up: a piece of bacon only has a small bit of grease in it, but over time you can fill a whole Crisco can. We learn to postpone a celebration: it takes a long time to save up enough to fry something big, so you’d better learn to wait.

My marriage is a mixed marriage.  I married out of the bacon and into the butter. Though her parents had lived in Oklahoma long enough to learn the good of bacon grease, they had not learned the discipline of saving it. Try as I might, I could not convince my wife to begin it on her own.  When I tried to do it, I was banished from the kitchen for “starting with frying four pieces of bacon.”

If we’d saved our bacon grease, I wouldn’t have had to.

Well, yes, I do get the point.  You can have bacon grease; you can eat fried foods.  But it is all in amounts: Portion size and frequency.

I can get away with two fried eggs, and even two fried eggs every day, but fried chicken--especially the chicken fried in bacon grease like Momma used to--one has to separate those occasions far from each other: Sundays? Birthdays? Humans setting foot on Mars?

We need to get beyond the superstitious thinking that some foods are magically good and some foods are cursed.

Bacon grease is not cursed.  It is blessed,but with a blessing that requires its controlled use.

The Catholics advise a controlled use of meat during lent. Perhaps there could be a similar but more stringent control of bacon grease: Only between 6 and 7am on weekdays and 7 and 8am on weekends.  (If that seems a little specific, it’s only your imagination.)

It’s something to think about.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )