Hoarding Bacon Fat and Holding on to Family Traditions
Southern SOIL
By: Stacy Reece
Stacy Reece is owner/founder of Down South House and Home, producers and purveyors of high quality goods for Southern households.
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Down South House & Home is for Southern women who wanted to grow up and be Atticus Finch. We’re for Southern women who would fight to the death for their grandmother’s cast iron collection. We’re for Southern women who value equality, literacy and hospitality. We’re for Southern women who know how to act in a cow pasture or a country club. We’re for Southern women with resolute characters and gracious dispositions. We’re for Southern women who hoard bacon fat.
through the holes of the strainer. You did not want to cook with this layer. You wanted the pretty ivory colored fat on top. My grandmother put a dollop of this grease in all of her vegetables every day. She fried her hamburgers in it. She died at 88 after smoking two packs of Virginia Slims a day and two different cancers. We don’t really fry enough in our house to warrant the old-fashioned grease container. I reuse the oil from frying chicken in a mason jar I keep in the
When I was growing up, every woman I knew had
refrigerator. There is something oddly satisfying
a metal canister next to her stove with the word
about storing fat in a clear glass container. You can
GREASE embossed on it. If you took off the lid,
clearly see the layers of fat that form as the grease
there was a strainer on top to catch the crunchy bits
cools, and it gives me the same amount of joy as
of meat left in the pan. If you took off the strainer
looking at an ant farm or a jar full of Sea Monkeys.
and looked inside, there was a smooth, ivory-
It also lets me avoid the dark brown fat at the
colored layer of fat that looked factory-made.
bottom that will scorch the next batch of chicken.
Digging down into this grease with a serving spoon
I had an aunt who went into a nursing home right
unearthed layers of fat like a geological dig, each
before the pandemic, and she let me come and
layer browner than the one before. If you scraped
pick out some things of hers that I liked. I took
the bottom of the container, you found a dark fat
home a car full of wonderful treasures, and one of
layer with tiny crunchy bits in it that had made it
them was this beautiful flow-blue Victoria Ironstone
