Memory Monday: Emergency Bacon

In the meat drawer of our main refrigerator in the kitchen/family room, there is a slab of bacon. It is made by Valentine’s, a business run by a Mennonite family, and sold at our local farmers’ market. In the meat drawer of our second refrigerator (which came with the house in 1983; we only bought the other refrigerator because we thought this one was not long for this world, but it never died, so it is our second refrigerator) in the little pantry off of the butler’s pantry that used to be the galley-style kitchen of the main house, there is a second, newer, slab of bacon.

This is my Emergency Bacon. Bacon is not the first comestible in our family to have the adjective “emergency” appended to it. Coffee was - “Mom’s Emergency Coffee.” That is the second jar of instant coffee that is always kept on hand so that if Mom (me) wakes up, goes to make her breakfast coffee, and finds only an empty jar, there will always be a second jar on the shelf. (Gourmet coffees and coffee made from freshly ground beans in the coffee pot are all great things, but I’m the only coffee-drinker in the family, so I have become used to drinking the instant stuff. I even like it.)

My husband started making sure that we always have that second jar of coffee both because he is a kind person and because it is better for my family if they do not have to deal with a Mom who has not had her morning coffee. And bacon followed that pattern, though kindness, not fear, was the only reason behind it. I don’t eat lots of it, but occasionally like it for “breakfast for dinner” or on my grilled cheese sandwich.

But even these items are not my first experience with “emergency food.” It was probably when I was in my preteens that I began to see the usefulness of setting aside a small supply of extra food. Sometimes it might just be a couple of small sweets for snacks; my skinny Dad had a wicked sweet tooth and dessert and snack foods often disappeared alarmingly fast in our house.

But there were also times when the shelves were pretty bare of food in general and even a few times when I was on my own for a while. So it was useful to have a little extra that would tide me over for a day or two - preferably something that would not get moldy or stale quickly. A box of crackers usually did the job. I kept it next to my jar of ironing money and old silver dollars (which over the years gradually disappeared).

In my high school years the emergency food supply was helped by the fact that we always had a long slab of welfare cheese in the refrigerator. In my opinion, welfare cheese was the best-tasting American cheese ever - great for grilled cheese sandwiches and tuna and cheese sandwiches (my favorite at that time). Sometimes the stash also included a package of vanilla cream cookies bought from a nearby family-owned convenience store. They were not my favorite cookies, but it did not cost much to buy a largish package (four rows of 10-12 cookies each), so they made a good emergency staple.

These not-quite-hoarding instincts have been retained to the present day. But the worry behind them is of a different type, inspired not by fear of running out of food; my husband and I are both employed and we live near a 7-11, which is great for times when there are blizzards or hurricanes. Whatever the circumstances and reasoning behind it, our pantry is filled with large quantities of certain staples and luxury items: next to piles of pasta boxes and precarious soup can towers (stocked up by my husband, who was a Boy Scout for many years and grew up in a family where “Be Prepared” was a sternly enforced rule of life) are five boxes of Farina and multiple jars of my favorite pesto sauce and HP sauce, which are too often hit-or-miss items at the local stores. From need to indulgence; from resourceful to pampered.

This post was written as part of Amy (We Tree) Coffin’s series of 52 weekly blogging prompts (featured on Genea-Bloggers) for writing our personal genealogy and history. The original prompt was: What was your favorite food from childhood? If it was homemade, who made it? What was in this dish, and why was it your favorite? What is your favorite dish now?

As usual, my post has strayed somewhat from the original questions. To return a bit to the original intent, I’ll say that my favorite lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup. And my favorite lunch now? The same thing, only white bread and American cheese have been replaced with Indian nan bread and curd cheese, and the tomato soup is not Campbell’s but Toigo Farms. And sometimes, for a treat, that sandwich includes two strips of last week’s Emergency Bacon, which is this week’s Regular Bacon.

A Tribute to Sauerkraut

At the end of the Lenten fast and various other fasting periods observed by the Eastern churches throughout the year, people look forward to eating meat again: ham, sausage, and other rich treats, not to mention the various dairy-based deserts that can be indulged in. My guilty secret during the fast is that I very much enjoy one of the foods that I can eat to my heart’s content (if I don’t mind the risk of a stroke or heart attack from the high sodium content): sauerkraut. So I celebrate feast days by throwing a few pieces of meat into a big glob of sauerkraut. Another delicious combination, albeit also a sure invitation to high blood pressure, is pirohi with sauerkraut and sour cream. Some people prefer crunchy (undercooked) sauerkraut; I like sauerkraut cooked with onions to the point that there is a little bit of caramelization here and there. And caraway seeds make it all even better.

Here is a recipe for one of our favorite dishes for Holy Supper (eaten on Christmas Eve, the last meal of the Filipovka (St. Philip’s Fast), the pre-Nativity fast), Sauerkraut and Mushroom Soup:

1 quart sauerkraut
1 medium onion, diced
1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds (we use more)
8 tablespoons margarine
1/2 cup barley
2 cups sliced mushrooms (can be canned or fresh)
2 quarts water
15-20 peppercorns
2 medium onions, diced
8 tablespoons flour
5 cups water

Boil together sauerkraut, 2 quarts water, onion, peppercorns, and caraway seeds. Sauté onions in margarine and add approximately 8 tablespoons flour until mixture is dark brown. Cook barley in 5 cups water until tender. Combine all mixtures together and add mushrooms.

(From Epiphany’s Seasons: Twenty-five Years of Parish Recipes, compiled by the Ladies Guild of Epiphany of Our Lord Church, 1996)

Sauerkraut in other languages:

kvashenaya kapusta (Russian)
kiszona kapusta, kvasna kapusta (Polish)
kyslá kapusta (Slovak)
kiselo zele (Bulgarian)
kisla kapusta (Ukrainian)
kyselé zelí (Czech)
savanyú kaposzta (Hungarian)

Submitted for the Carnival of Central and Eastern European Genealogy: Food.

Memory Monday: Family Food

This article will be a two-fer: both part of my Memory Monday series and an entry for weekly blogging prompt #6: “Let readers in to your kitchen. Discuss your family’s favorite foods. What was a typical Sunday dinner in your childhood house? What did grandma make that had you coming back for more? Were there any dishes that the dog wouldn’t even eat?”

As it so happens, I had intended to write about family food a couple of weeks ago, but when I heard about the death of Aunt Joy, priorities were changed and the subject was postponed. Speaking of Aunt Joy, as I mentioned in that article our favorite dish was Boozy Fruit Salad. Aunt Joy also thought I was old enough to learn how to cook, so she taught me some of the basics of cooking; the main dish I remember learning from her was mashed potatoes (mashed potatoes may seem like a simple dish, but good mashed potatoes are another thing altogether). I also have fond memories of my grandmother Sallie Brinlee’s wonderful breakfasts, which I wrote about in Visiting with Grandma Brinlee.

The first dish that came into my head when I got the idea to write this article was an incredibly delicious candy made by my Aunt Irene, my mother’s next-youngest sister, who gave my mother the recipe. The candy is associated with Christmas in my memory, which is probably correct, because this candy is very labor-intensive to make. The problem is that I cannot remember the name by which we referred to this candy; it is probably something like chocolate pecan balls. I thought for sure that the recipe would be in my mother’s old recipe box, but I went through all of the recipes in there and could not find it. As I remember, the candy consisted of a small ball made out of condensed milk, powdered sugar, vanilla, and pecans dipped in chocolate and paraffin. These calorific little confections were so incredibly delicious that it was nearly impossible to eat just one. It was difficult to hide them, because in the warm winter weather of Texas/Southern California, it was best to keep them in the refrigerator. I remember going to great pains to calculate exactly how many I could sneak from the refrigerator without it looking like some s-e-r-i-o-u-s filching.

So, along with Missing Photo Album Number 4 (one of my mother’s old photo albums that I cannot find), the mysterious candy recipe will continue to haunt me until I find it.

With the exception of a few special treats and holiday foods, food was generally not a very exciting item in our house; my father was a meat-potatoes-boring vegetable or salad kind of man, and did not even care much for fried chicken. Memorable foods included: divinity fudge and any cake with my mother’s white icing on it (both items that benefited by the dry climate of northeast Texas and the San Bernardino desert), her Christmas fruitcake (a back- and arm-breaking production that she taught me how to make), and tuna gravy on toast (which was actually what we ate when we had to save money, but it was a treat to me). The most disgusting dish I can remember was my mother’s stewed tomatoes, which included bread and sugar. The less said the better.

After my parents divorced and my mother and I moved to Texas, she got more adventurous in her cooking, and I think we began to enjoy our meals more. As I leafed through her recipe box, I noticed a number of the recipes had adjectives such as “Mexican,” “Italian,” and “spicy,” something which would not have been served in our household when I was little. When I went off to college, my roommate taught me how to cook, and we would find interesting recipes (a lot of which included eggplant, a favorite of mine) to prepare. Together with out boyfriends, we put together some decent meals and even invited a couple of professors to dinner. I would take recipes home to Mom that didn’t include any ingredients that couldn’t be purchased in our small town grocery store. The biggest change I remember was that we ate a lot of dishes with mushrooms.

I did discover one truly wonderful food while I was still in high school: kolaches. Almost anything called “kolache” is delicious, but these Bohemian (Czech) kolaches are close to heavenly. Bohemian kolaches are the puffy yeast dough kind with various fillings (cream cheese, poppyseed, prune (known as lekvar in some places), or other type of jam) rather than the crispy tube or star pattern type more common among the Slovaks (different part of Texas) and Rusyns. We were on a band trip to Houston to perform in a big State Honor Bands concert (we were the class AA Texas State Honor Band that year), and someone’s grandmother had sent along a basket of these heavenly clouds. The memory of the one kolache I ate haunted me for years, until I found a good recipe for these kolaches in the Joy of Cooking cookbook my mother bought for me for Christmas; I knew it was the right recipe when I saw that it called for lemon peel in the dough – that is what makes the dough taste so wonderful.

Here is my mother’s recipe for “Easy No-Cook Divinity”:

In small mixer bowl, combine frosting mix (Fluffy white Betty Crocker dry mix), 1/3 cup corn syrup, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and 1/2 cup boiling water. Beat on highest speed until stiff peaks form, about 5 minutes. Transfer to large mixer bowl; on low speed, blend in 1 lb. confectioner’s sugar gradually. Stir in 1 cup nuts. Drop mixture by teaspoonsful onto waxed paper. When outside of candies seem firm, turn over. Allow to dry 12 hours or overnight. Store candies in airtight container. Makes 5 to 6 dozen candies.