Drippin's

My grandmother made me do it.  This morning, from across the divide of death, she compelled me to fry a pair of eggs in drippin’s.  Unsurprisingly, the noun drippin’s is not in the dictionary.  I offer instead an entry from Wikipedia listed under “bacon” and subheading “bacon fat.”

Bacon fat liquefies and becomes bacon drippings when it is heated. Once cool, it firms into lard if from uncured meat or rendered bacon fat if from cured meat. Bacon fat is flavorful and is used for various cooking purposes. Traditionally, bacon grease is saved in British and southern U.S. cuisine and used as a base for cooking and as an all-purpose flavoring for everything from gravy to cornbread to salad dressing.  One teaspoon (4 g, 0.14 oz) of bacon grease has 38 calories (160 kJ). It is composed almost completely of fat with very little additional nutritional value. Bacon fat is roughly 40% saturated.  Despite the potential health risks of excessive bacon grease consumption, it remains popular in the cuisine of the American South.

I especially love the last sentence of explanation.  We know bacon is no health food.  Nonetheless, every now and again I get a hankering for it.  And whilst I fry it up my children swarm through the kitchen declaring me the most fabulous, wonderful, superb mother in the world!  Why?  Because I am serving bacon.  Never mind the miles I clock each week in the van or the laundry or the trickle of two dollars here and five dollars there.  These elicit no honor.  But if I slap one slab of salt cured pork on a griddle the praise piles on! 

This morning, my family reaped the benefits of bacon cooked weeks ago.  You might wonder how my beloved deceased grandmother came to be responsible for these bacon-laced eggs.  Well, she had a repurposed lidded coffee can on the bottom shelf of her icebox door in which she routinely poured bacon grease after it cooled.  Drippin’s.  She did not waste a lick of it.  She used it to fry potatoes with onions or toss a cabbage salad with hot bacon dressing (she wasn’t much for cornbread or she would have had the sense to use it there, too).  Because I saw her save the smoky liquid so many times I, too, at the end of a family bacon feast, pour my grease into a container, albeit a small ceramic bowl, and store it tightly covered on my fridge door.  Then, several months later when the bacon craving comes again I throw it away and replace it with a new quarter cup or so of fresh fat.  And the cycle continues.  I have routinely never used a speck of the grease, yet I am driven to save it. 

Recently, that changed.  Today I served up a batch of the most delectable scrambled eggs ever known, sizzled to savory perfection in a 38 calorie, 40% saturated fat teaspoon of drippin’s.  Grandma smiled with me over ever bite.