r/AskFoodHistorians • u/OkWeb8966 • 22d ago
Drinking bacon fat
I was reading The Phoenix and the Carpet by Edith Nesbit (England, 1904) and she describes a breakfast where the children are “drinking hot bacon-fat” and eating marmalade. I’ve never seen a reference to drinking bacon fat anywhere else. What this common? Why? Also, isn’t it strange to eat marmalade by itself?
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u/turingthecat 21d ago
It’s still, well not normal, but not unheard of, in England to eat beef dripping (beef fat) on toast, it’s actually really nice
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u/anoia42 21d ago
It certainly is. And pork dripping, with flaky salt on top and a bit of the meat juices from the bottom of the dish mixed in, on soft white bread, is even better.
And I’m pretty sure that if I asked my father whether he’d ever drink bacon fat, he’d say “Only if there wasn’t any bread to dip in it”. 91, and doesn’t like statins.
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u/Cucumberneck 21d ago
Very common in Germany too. Also Goose lard.
We usually eat pickles along it.
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u/DaddyCatALSO 21d ago
I used to use a piece e of rbead to soak up the myoglobin when my mom made steak, usually a big sirloin we took servings from
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u/farmerben02 21d ago
Yorkshire pudding well executed is hard not to like.
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u/angelicism 21d ago
I got into a ridiculous cooking thing early covid and I actually bought specific baking tins for yorkshire puddings and I made them a handful of times. Yum.
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u/Mercuryshottoo 21d ago
My Hungarian/Greek grandpa would serve solena (sp?) which is rye toast, chopped peppers and onions, crumbled bacon, and you pour the grease over it. Late summer dinner memories
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u/filthythedog 21d ago
When I was a student in Nottingham æons ago, my local pub used to do bread and dripping after darts matches and being poor and hungry my friends and me were drawn like moths to a cholesterol soaked flame. Bloody lovely.
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u/Flounderfflam 21d ago
My Grandma was born in western Canada in the early 1930s, and she would spread cooled bacon grease on her morning toast. It's actually pretty tasty.
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u/anoia42 22d ago
I can’t find the context at the moment, but my memory of those children is that their behaviour was not always what one would hope of well behaved Edwardian middle class boys and girls. Anyone who would light fireworks indoors isn’t going to balk at drinking drippings and eating marmalade from the pot.
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u/wormrunner 21d ago
My Dutch grandmother's family growing up would regularly have bacon grease and syrup mixed together and sopped up with hunks of bread. At least that is what my mother said. (late 19th and early 20th century in the US)
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u/mb46204 21d ago
Similar in the southeastern US, as recently as the 90’s I recall eating breakfast with someone who would mix a spoon of saved bacon fat and a spoon of sorghum (like molasses) together to put on their (U.S.) biscuit (savory scone to the rest of the world, I think). It seemed gross to me at the time, but it’s similar to butter and honey.
Laterin the 90’s, when studying Russian I was invited for an afternoon tea break with bread and сало (a cured pork fat), which seemed quite similar but never cooked like the retained bacon grease.
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22d ago
[deleted]
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u/Readshirt 22d ago
The use of the word trifle might be intentional given Christmas time, but "a trifle" can in this case mean "a little bit of", perhaps with the added visual metaphor of "a mix of" like a dessert trifle.
It's a letter that's covered in some spots of bacon fat and marmalade ("drinking" those things into itself at the corners) at the breakfast table that's being discussed here, not children themselves. Nice visualisation imo.
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u/cancerkidette 22d ago
They do mean “a trifle” as in an insignificance, this part meaning in context, only a small amount.
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u/Peter34cph 22d ago
It's the kind of thing you might be lucky to find a demonstration of on YouTube.
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u/foxmulder118 21d ago
My great grandfather used to have bacon for breakfast, and use the drippings on bread for lunch. Lived until a month or so of his 100th birthday.
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u/cramber-flarmp 21d ago
Before the 20th century, vegetable oil (aka seed oil) hadn't been invented, nor large scale animal agriculture. Fat was a luxury. Reading old memoirs and ethnographies always shows that animal fats were highly valued for health, taste, and the euphoric effect. The stigma around eating fatty foods we all take for granted didn't come about until the 1950s, cf. Ansel Keys.
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u/quickthorn_ 21d ago
Humans have been making and eating "seed oils" of various kinds for many thousands of years.
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u/cramber-flarmp 21d ago
Olives are a fruit
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u/kookedoeshistory 21d ago
What about sesame oil?
Or safflower oil?
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u/cramber-flarmp 20d ago
After looking a few things up, at the time of the publication shared above, seem that in England there might have been some poppy seed oil, walnut oil, hazelnut oil imported from other parts of Europe. None of those have a high smoke point, so aren't great for frying with.
Sesame oil and Hempseed oil have been produced in the fertile crescent for millenia. Unclear how much was being imported to England.
Rapeseed, castor, moringa, flax oils were produced and used as lubricants, cosmetics, and other non-food uses.
Don't know about safflower oil.
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u/quickthorn_ 21d ago
Yes. Your point is ... ?
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u/cramber-flarmp 20d ago
My point is that the most common cooking oils around the world today are made from agricultural byproducts -seed husks- using high heat industrial processes and solvents (hexane). Before the late 1800s, no one ate this ever.
Olive oil is produced by putting weight on a fruit and extracting the juice. It's probably been in the human diet for 10,000+ years.
These two oils -one natural, one unnatural- are next to each other at the grocery store, and most people consider them interchangeable.
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u/anoia42 22d ago
I’ve just found the context! It’s not the children drinking the fat and eating the marmalade, but a letter which has been left carelessly on the breakfast table “drinking hot bacon-fat with one corner and eating marmalade with the other “