When my Dad was in charge, he never
“made” breakfast, he always “scared it up”. When living in a cabin – he assured
us – he would leave the door open so that he could run outside just in time to
catch the manually-flipped “flapjacks” as they exited the chimney. I thought of
all that last week as I noted an unexpected “find” in a nearby meat department,
thereupon bringing home a lovely, glistening, five-pound “pork belly”.
After drying the exceptionally lean
fresh cut, I covered it with a dry rub of salt, pepper and brown sugar (my
private stock of maple sugar too precious to reduce further), and set it to
cure, wrapped, in the bottom of my outdoor refrigerator where I was careful to
turn it several times daily over its five-day aging process. Rinsed, dried and
ready for the most sacred step of all, it went into my pre-heated smoker over
chips of maple wood where I tended it lovingly for about five hours. With a
golden “bark” and an internal temperature of 165 degrees, I pulled it out to
cool gently before slicing thick quarter-inch slabs redolent of sweet-salty
maple magic.
The next morning, I made a brief
stop at our hen house to pick up a couple of just-laid brown eggs before
putting a skillet on the heat. I drank in the incomparable smoky smell of the
first few strips of hours-old bacon which I set aside on kitchen toweling when
half done. Spooning just a jot-and-a-tittle of hot pan fat over the quivering
yokes, the bacon returned just in time to get re-acquainted and back to
temperature before it was savoring time. You’ll have to cut me some slack for
believing that I haven’t scared up a
better, sweeter-tasting breakfast than that one in a very long time; and I
still have at least 4.5 pounds of incomparable smoked pork belly to look forward to.
Back on the Vermont hillside farm of
my teenage years, the smoking fire would have been funneled underground through
several feet of smoldering maple chips or dry corn cobs before being “trapped”
in an inverted wooden barrel where the bacon and hams hung suspended, for a
longer period of time. We had no “electric freezer” back in those times and in
that far northern clime, and along with other parts of the pigs and other farm
animals the cut meat leavings were merely wrapped, labeled and placed on
shelves in an old outdoor cabinet in our woodshed where they kept frozen solid
until May – or maybe June.
My Dad was probably fortunate to
pass on from this world before such wonderful breakfast fare became “illegal”.
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