[Sca-cooks] bacon in corn bread

[Cat Dancer]

>> I don't know about recipe books, but that is how my grandmother
>> made it. We aren't African American...my heritage is pure West
>> Virginia hillbilly (Clay County to be exact). I remember her
>> keeping a coffee can next to the stove to collect the bacon grease
>> for use in other recipes.
>>
>> Ysabeau
>> Barony of Bryn Gwlad
>> Ansteorra
>
> Yeah, use of bacon grease in everything isn't a racial thing. it's a poor
> Southerner thing. I remember my mother came back from visiting a boyfriend's
> folks in Kentucky, and she couldn't get over a couple things, one being that
> they cooked all vegetation to death, the other that they put bacon or bacon
> grease into everything.
>
> My mother still talks about the evening, some time later, when he was over
> for dinner, and he was complaining about the ice cream flavor. I looked at
> him and ask, "What's the matter- want some bacon grease on it?" and he
> stomped off in a snit. She was laughing too hard, to kill me...
>
> Phlip

*giggles*

I have a dear friend from the Iron Range (which is essentially 
Minnesotan-flavored mining country) who was delighted to discover the can 
I save bacon grease in so he could make proper fried potatoes. So maybe 
it's a non-racial, non-regional poor thing, since the Iron Range is made 
up of mostly assorted Scandahoovians.

I'm not entirely sure when I personally made the jump from pouring the 
bacon grease into an old soup can to throw out when it was cool (learned 
from Mom, who, when her pork allergy was dormant, still had some sort of 
block when it came to using bacon grease to cook with) to using the saved 
bacon grease as a cooking fat.

Margaret FitzWilliam