Mac McCarty
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

As blue crabs were to Lisa Renee, so was bacon to me. We killed & butchered our own porkers annually & had a smokehouse dedicated to ham & bacon. (One of probably many asides: we also rendered the fat into lye soap — a childhood accident with an open wood-fired cauldron used in that process was the cause of Ray Charles’ blindness — he was not blind from birth.)

Bacon & egg mash was one of my first solid foods & bacon rind (& paregoric — tincture of opium) saw me & many other rural Texas children through the teething process. (This — along with my father’s Camels, smoked in closed winter cars — probably contributed to my addictive proclivities & attitudes toward same…though bacon itself may have been the overriding factor.) I was in elementary school before I discovered grocery store bacon had no rind. (Bacon rind = pig skin, commonly included in many Asian pork dishes. Waste not, want not.)

Where was I? (Where am I?) Oh yeah, bacon! I’ve stopped cooking it. You see, about 50yrs ago I discovered the bacon press — a disk of Pyrex with a central handle that looks like it might be the lid to a missing pot. (In restaurant applications, a flat metal square with a wooden handle for the same use on griddles. This eponymous piece of kitchen gear holds the bacon firmly against the skillet so that it doesn’t wrinkle & cook unevenly. That utensil being unknown in the Philippines has discouraged my bacon lust — the overly crisp peaks & under-done valleys have become intolerable after a lifetime of otherwise evenly cooked, properly pressed, unshrunken bacon.

One final aside w/r/t bacon grease. I always depended on it for the proper preparation of certain foods, but, after several years among the healthy-eating Nazis of Northern California caused me to surrender to peer pressure, my kitchen anathematized by the mere presence of collected (& properly strained) bacon grease.

All these asides aside, my real purpose here is to encourage your food blogging with the following story. I rent a room in an unusually creative household that includes a most peculiar young man about 11yrs old. As much as his peculiarities bode well for a creative future, his childhood eating habits can be described as typically finicky.

I was speaking with him recently (an unusual circumstance, since I am very often described as “not good with children”) and brought up your information about how the sense of taste went into decline at an early age. I encouraged him to consciously indulge in foods he delighted in, because they would never again taste as good — as thrilling — as they taste at his present age. (In all fairness, I also admitted that he would surely discover new tastes to thrill to, but they were likely to lack the brute intensity of his present experiences.) I’m pleased to report that he took that advice to heart. At meal time, at least, he now eats with renewed concentration — what he does w/r/t junk food is less obvious.

Having written all this in sincere procrastination (I have a chapter of my novel to finish) it dawns on me that that youth/taste/thrill constellation might not have actually been written by you — and, even in a fit of procrastination, I’m too lazy to check. Whatever. If you didn’t write it, well, never mind. Whether you did or not, keep up with the food blogging, ha? It’s an excellent way to smuggle in more personal essay.

    Mac McCarty

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    Purveyor of anecdotal information; pattern recognizer; tool user; into that creative thingy.