Bring Home the Bacon
We are what we obsess about eating is a truth worth repeating as I chase down an amazing meat pie from Natchez, La. I came to Los Angeles from New Orleans as a young boy with an appetite for Creole cream cheese and po’ boys made with crusty baguettes, tart Swiss cheese and thinly sliced ham, and some mayonnaise and Creole mustard. I still have those tastes, and if anything they’ve only become more intense. It’s easy for me to rationalize that oysters want to be fried in cornmeal and crawfish want to die a horrible death by boiling just to make dinner wonderful.
It’s a powerful impulse to want to reconnect with those foods that make you think of home. When well-heeled relatives had the juice to fly to New Orleans for a short visit it was a familial obligation to bring back a blessed gallon can of oysters. Really, when those oysters reached my mother’s hands we’d all rejoice in anticipation. It amazes me to this day, blue ice or not, that those oysters sitting on the hot tarmac of LAX didn’t become a toxic cocktail poisoning the po’ boys and gumbos of homesick New Orleans natives suffering for a taste of the good stuff. Though I suspect even if we had known the danger, we’d just have fried the oysters extra hard and slapped them on a French loaf and layered on the dressing.
It’s a culinary tragedy when you want to reacquaint yourself with something you ate and enjoyed as a child, but you discover that it may be gone, vanished in a generation. Creole cream cheese is that for me. I remember the bright yellow carton and the lumpy clabber, and tasting it and wondering why anyone would want to eat something so sour. Then my mother would scoop spoonfuls of sugar into it, and suddenly it was deliciously tart and powerfully sweet. My grandfather liked it with biscuits, as though he were a country gentleman. I realized not long ago that I wanted to have some again. I heard of a guy who still made the stuff in the French Quarter, but that was before Hurricane Katrina, so who knows when he’ll return.
My wife’s family is from Winchester, Ky., and her relatives have culinary traditions as robust as my folks’ in New Orleans. Uncle Emmett offered me a rare and very fine homemade corn liquor from the Appalachian Mountains. I was surprised at its smoothness, though sadly I couldn’t take it home with me. But I could the bacon, and not just any bacon: attitudinal bacon, bad-ass bacon. Kentuckians are obsessed with bacon, and they know good bacon from what we eat out here on the vegan coast.
Aunt Nana suggested that Gina and I stop at a grocery near Winchester for some. I had no idea how daunting that would be, choosing from an astonishing and confounding variety, from peppered bacon to maple to four kinds of jowls. I called my friend, a man obsessed with bacon in all its manifestations. “Buy whatever looks interesting,” he said. Well, it all looked interesting. I struggled to get it down to something manageable, about 15 or so brands. He held a bacon tasting and it was all good. Then Aunt Nana sent us a bacon from Burgers’ Smokehouse, located in the weirdness of California, Mo. Their pepper bacon rocked my world, thick with smoky flavor but piquant with pepper and a hint of sweetness. And if you’re a bacon, eggs and grits person, check out Weisenberger Mills’ grits, where they still use a stone mill to grind the corn. Now I go online for my grits from Kentucky (www.weisenberger.com) and my pepper bacon from Missouri (www.smokehouse.com), and I hope, because hope springs eternal, that one day I’ll be able to order an ongoing supply of Creole cream cheese.