I have two medium glass jars of leftover bacon grease sitting on my kitchen counter, nestled in between my bottle of olive oil and my vintage avocado green floral motif butter dish. I never assumed I would be the sort of person who strains and saves bacon grease to use in my cooking, but, really, now, it’s low on the list of broken assumptions I’ve amassed in my decades on earth. At least I can assuage this assumption with the knowledge that it’s really my husband who does the straining and the pouring. I simply benefit from the full jars.
Growing up, there was a stove burner in permanent use as place holder; in fact, it’s still in use to this day. Shortening, back then, came in metal cans and, when one was emptied, my mom washed and cleaned it and it took up residence on the back left burner where it stands to this day. It’s the place where extra bacon grease is deposited, one meal at a time, comingled into a perpetual can of fat that would go into countless meals of hotcakes and eggs or biscuits and gravy, and the things to feed a large family before shuttling them off to school. It was as normal as anything else in our home, but also something left behind once I headed out on my own.
I bought and used cooking spray for the first time in college. I couldn’t believe the ease this afforded and wondered, on more than one occasion why my mom hadn’t just picked up a can at the store and tossed the can of pig once and for all. It seemed so simple, in my 18 year old mind, and I vowed mine would be a home where spray on goodness reigned. And then, as life seems to do, I slowly started reverting to the ways of my mother.
At first, after the broken cooking spray vow, it was little things: this seemed easier and that was all I knew. And then, pregnant with my son, I embraced all things organic and I started wondering if the old ways were really the better ways, the more organic ways, the greener ways. I started reading labels obsessively and the things of my youth started making more sense. A little cleaning with baking soda here, plastic abhorrence there until, one day, I found a farmer not far from Tooele that sold lard by the bucket. I bought a four pound tub and then simply became…overwhelmed. I had a toddler, a set of ideals, a high horse full of principles and no clue what to do while drowning in new motherhood. I stuck that tub into our deep freeze and piled it with tortillas and whole chickens and frozen butter, anything, really to try and cover the guilt. But that bucket was just awkward enough to stick out when anything was jostled and mock me.
A few years later we graduated to an upright freezer and I tossed the lard and most of the guilt. I was certain the whole episode should have been easier and why couldn’t I find a good ‘real food’ solution for flaky biscuits and perfect hotcakes? I pondered this as I slowly stirred some milk gravy in my cast iron pan. We were having biscuits and gravy for dinner that night simply because we’d had bacon earlier in the week and when you have bacon drippings left over in your pan, you make gravy because bacon grease is just the right fat to base your gravy on. And then, while stirring the milk in a methodical figure eight, just the way my mother taught me, the very obvious reached my mind. My mom’s shortening can full of bacon grease. That night, I lamented to my husband that it really is too bad we couldn’t find an old shortening can to sit on our back burner, full of grease so I could make gravy more often than just right after a meal with bacon. And I kept lamenting until a purge of our kitchen produced two glass jars with no obvious purpose other than looking pretty and being shoved and forgotten in the back of a cabinet. I sat them aside in our donate pile, but my husband picked them up and simply said, “these would be perfect to hold some bacon grease”.
I certainly don’t know the food science behind it, but I do have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence to support my claim that bacon fat equals perfect, thick gravy. Measurements are suggestions, but a heaping spoonful of fat and a heaping spoonful of flour, mixed together and cooked, just a little is the base to great white gravy. Slowly add in your milk on a low medium setting, stirring in a figure eight as you go. The gravy should thicken and bubble, but not burn. Try it and you might find yourself searching for your own perfect grease container.
