Also known as white bacon

For some time now, I’ve meant to reacquaint myself with a childhood friend. You know how it is with intentions, though; distractions get in the way; opportunities go overlooked; days pass by, becoming weeks, then months. So yes, it’s taken a while. This evening, however, I finally fulfilled that desire.

Salt pork, called white bacon by some: cut from the belly of some unfortunate cousin of Porky Pig and cured in salt. Relatively inexpensive at about three dollars a pound, salt pork is often used to impart flavor to green beans and greens such as collards. That’s how I remember its use from my youth (and I’m old enough now, sadly, that I need not qualify the word ‘youth’ with ‘relative’). Mom would usually take the time to slice and reserve a couple of small pieces of pork, though, and fry it up for my brother and myself. It was a treat, and a fairly rare one; I came to think of it as something that nearly required a special occasion to enjoy. Consequently, the times I indulged in this salty snack were few indeed, and far (as in years) between.

Fast-forward to a time called Last Month, and this realization: I was an adult. A wage-earning, tax-paying adult, neither in the military nor in prison, and so fully possessed of choice when it came to food. That is: I could prepare and enjoy salt pork whenever I felt like it. I could have it one a week if I liked, by gum.

But, you know, intentions. It took a few more months before I actually remembered to write salt pork on a grocery list, and some days after that before I decided to slice away three pieces, about an ounce and a third apiece (somewhat larger, I will admit than the portions provided long ago by my mother), and put them in non-stick pan over medium-high flame. The hunk of pork has a kind of cap or skin on one side, not thin but tougher than the fat beneath it. One about to indulge might be tempted to remove that cap. One should resist that temptation.

There’s not much of a recipe to this. Fry the pork on one side. Flip the pieces over. Fry them some more. And… done. I like my salt pork to be just to the point of singed.

Crispy, chewy, salty to the limits of endurance, a mouth feel that only fat can provide, no redeeming elements except pure taste.

I’m going to have some more tomorrow.