Originally published 1/29/17
Southerners have an affinity for pork. All kinds of pork: pork shoulder (cook it long and slow, or BBQ it), ham (smoked to cure), hock and jowl (to season greens), chops (for the grill), sausage (a lot of stuff we don't want to talk about) and, the most en vogue currently, pork belly, which is really pre-bacon, unsmoked, unsliced. Bacon, though, is by far, the king of pork. I mean, who doesn't like bacon? And, just recently, we learned that when you bake it with brown sugar on it, it becomes candy-like. The ultimate sweet and salty treat. As a transplanted Southerner, we had bacon with pancakes on Saturday, and maybe with eggs and grits on Sunday. It wasn't until I lived with Jodi Bateman for a summer, though, that I really experienced bacon. Jodi appeared in my life the summer after I graduated from college. I needed a place to live, as I planned to stay in Columbia to be a fulltime manager of the Oops! Co., a small retail store I worked in my senior year of college. My manager was a high school acquaintance of mine, and a college friend of Jodi's. She happened to know that Jodi was in need of a roommate for her three-bedroom house just for the summer. Sounded perfect. Those days (1991), you didn't interview people, or even meet them before you agreed that you could live together. I mean, I needed a place to live, Bonnie knew Jodi, the price was right, the location was good, and no furniture was required. Like I said, perfect. I miss being young and unafraid. Jodi and two friends rented a big, white, two-story house in Shandon, an old, affluent neighborhood in downtown Columbia. The downstairs windows were painted shut, and the house was not climate controlled. Upstairs in the bedrooms, box fans were wedged in the windows and ceiling fans whirred constantly. After having lived in a dorm for four years, I was thrilled to be in a house. Like an adult. Jodi Bateman was born and raised in Chawl-ston, SC. That's how you have to say it. She has a smile that reaches up to her big blue eyes, that hide every once in while behind her lashy eyelids that close slowly when she flirts with you. Jodi flirts in the way that all delicate Southern women do, with everyone they ever meet. Southern women flirt not because they're dingy, or need a man, I learned from Jodi. Southern women flirt because they are smarter than you, and they're going to show you by manipulating you into doing whatever they need you to do. You will do it as you blush, and say "aw shucks" and hope that a Southern woman like Jodi will keep talking to you.
This is me and Jodi, at left, in the winter of 1992, likely, on a barrier island. Those are just off the coast of Charleston, and where Charlestonians go to escape the heat of the city in the summer, and where now we sometimes go in winter to remember summer.
Jodi was a true Southern hostess as well, convincing boys to come over, bring us beer, and have suppa at our house. Jodi was a graduate student, and I had just finished school, so our dinner parties weren't exactly extravagant. But they were elegant. Elegant in a way that we made 13-bean soup because it cost $1.89, and all the meat it took was a ham hock. We would set the table, serve up the soup, and watch those boys swelter in a 105-degree dining room that had not even a hint of a cross breeze on account of the windows that were painted shut. But they would be so enamored by Jodi's sashaying and flirting and blue eyes peeking out from her eyelashes that they didn't care how hot it was. Jodi and I lived together for just that hot, sweltering summer of 1991. In August her roommate came back, and soon after I moved to Sumter to begin a career in journalism. Jodi and I saw each other occasionally over the years, and she was even in my first wedding, but we never spent as much time together as we did that summer. I've been thinking about Jodi lately because Facebook, of course, has reunited us, but also because of a preponderance of bacon grease that has found its way to my counter. We love bacon.
Two cups of bacon grease, left. I just put some in the kale I sautéed, then covered it in cream. Is kale still good for you that way?
Bacon, being comprised mostly of fat, renders much of it during frying, and, depending on how much bacon you're cooking, has to be poured off during the course of frying. My mom used to dig a can out of the trash, pour it in there, wait for it to solidify, and throw it away with the night's trash. My mom also kept our trash in the sink, which is weird, and a whole 'nother topic. We weren't Southern like Jodi, though. That summer, for some reason, we fried a lot of bacon. It must not have cost as much as it does now. Jodi kept her bacon grease in a Mason jar next to the stove. In quart jars. That's a lot of bacon grease. When a jar got full, she would put it in the freezer, and start another one. One day, I finally got to wondering about the growing number of Mason jars of bacon in our freezer. There must be something Southern that you do with all that grease that Jodi just hadn't revealed to me yet. I was learning a lot from her. So I finally asked when we were tucking yet another Mason jar into the freezer. "Jodi, what are you going to do with all this frozen bacon grease?" I asked her. I couldn't wait to learn the next Southern secret that she had to impart upon me. Her big eyes flew open, and she cracked into a big smile, put her hand up to cover her mouth, and began to laugh. "I don't know!!" she said after she thought about it for a minute. "My momma just always put them in the freezer!" Now, mommas are important everywhere, but they hold a certain reverence in the South. Mommas know things, and do things, and we just know that we have to do them for that very reason. Mommas teach us how to make biscuits, how to peel tomatoes, how to can peaches, how to make pound cake and how to make a Sunday roast. They teach us to go to church, play just enough piano, and to display the right amount of family pictures. And they teach us how to set a table, host a dinner, and put a fingertip towel in the bathroom for guests. We do all those things and know them because our mommas taught us to. Even me, as a Southern transplant, learned all of those Southern things from my momma, who worked hard to assimilate us into Southern life. So Jodi got on the phone and dialed her momma, long distance. That's how important this question was. "Momma, what do I do with all that bacon grease in the freezer that we've been saving from cookin' bacon?" She, too, waited anxiously to hear what Southern culinary secret she had somehow missed growing up. There was more to learn. "Well Jodi, I throw it away!" Mommas sometimes do things we don't know about. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me. John 14:1 Jodi was blindly following her momma's actions, just as we are to follow God's actions and instructions. As little children, or big kids in our mommas' houses, we trust them, and know that everything they do has a purpose, most of which is to benefit us, their children. Later in life, we learn that everything God does is to benefit his children (us, of course) as well, but we don't always follow him as blindly as we do our mommas. Adulting, as my finance advisor calls it, is much more difficult than growing up. Adulting involves paying bills, answering to a boss, pleasing clients, cooking dinner every night, and making sure the oil is changed in the car. Nothing happens magically anymore, like it did when we were kids. Now we are the magic, making it happen for our families. And so we see reality, which sometimes is ugly and frustrating. I'm working hard to put my trust in God, and not to let my heart be troubled. I read Jesus Calling every morning, which is written by a woman for women. So she really knows how to speak to the frustration of details, perfection and adulting challenges that women face. Reading her conversations with God, and the verses, like the one above, that she picks out for me have been comforting and helpful. Those worries I have are kind of like that bacon grease. They are real, they are important, but I can't hold on to them all the time. What good will that do? Jesus tells us over and over that we are not to worry, and that worry is even considered a sin! (which I try not to do...jk) But its consideration as a sin lets me know how serious God is when he says we should not worry, and we shouldn't be anxious. So this week, as I head back to Greenville to work with my team, I'm gonna fry some bacon. That means, I'm going to do the work. I'm going to fry the bacon, eat it, share it, put it on some spinach salad, and then I'm going to throw away the bacon grease. I am not going to worry. I'm going to open a new pack of bacon, fry it up, and throw away the grease. That summer, after we learned that the destiny of the bacon was to go in the trash, we were stunned, and hysterical. We both thought there would be some magical reason, some project, some revelation about this bacon grease we had so methodically stored in the freezer all summer. I don't think we threw that bacon grease away directly. I want to remember that it took us a bit to actually realize that nothing was going to become of that grease. It did go in the trash, eventually, with quite a chuckle, I'm sure.
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