Saturday, July 05, 2014
Global bacon
I've got a couple of highly welcome days without new work assignments, so I've been expanding to fill the available time. Catching up chores, letting out some pent-up graphics energy, reading a 1912 Manual for Army Cooks.
Most of it is what you'd expect. Managing a mess hall with insubordinate privates, recipes for feeding a hungry platoon. Each soldier was expected to know the basics of cooking, so he could carry dry ingredients when out on a solo scout mission. A more interesting section described living off the land, for situations where your supply line has failed. How to butcher rabbits, how to detect bad mushrooms, how to poach "acquire" crops from farm fields.
The recipes look hearty but remarkably repetitive.
Everything from bacon to steak to eggs to parsnips to sweet buns is based on BACON. Strips of bacon, bacon fat, bacon drippings. Bacon is the universal ingredient of all recipes, just as "global warming" is the universal boogeyman of all research.
Reading these, I realized this was exactly how my mother cooked. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen, but the BACON ingredients BACON were BACON obvious BACON enough BACON. She must have picked this up from her ...
NO. She didn't pick it up from her mother! I ate with Grandma often in the '70s when I lived in Ponca. By then I had been cooking for myself, so I could understand the process. Grandma's food was entirely different. Crisp, precise, lean, German. Like Grandma. The base ingredient was not bacon, it was vinegar. Again like Grandma.
So where did my mother learn to cook like a 1912 mess sergeant? It's a puzzle!
¶ 5:01 PM 
Everything from bacon to steak to eggs to parsnips to sweet buns is based on BACON. Strips of bacon, bacon fat, bacon drippings. Bacon is the universal ingredient of all recipes, just as "global warming" is the universal boogeyman of all research.
Reading these, I realized this was exactly how my mother cooked. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen, but the BACON ingredients BACON were BACON obvious BACON enough BACON. She must have picked this up from her ...
NO. She didn't pick it up from her mother! I ate with Grandma often in the '70s when I lived in Ponca. By then I had been cooking for myself, so I could understand the process. Grandma's food was entirely different. Crisp, precise, lean, German. Like Grandma. The base ingredient was not bacon, it was vinegar. Again like Grandma.
So where did my mother learn to cook like a 1912 mess sergeant? It's a puzzle!
¶ 5:01 PM
