"Mike Lyle" wrote in message
...
Rusty Hinge 2 wrote:
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from "Mike Lyle" contains
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But I don't think the dripping from grilled bacon actually has
much
salt in it: doesn't seem to when I spread it on bread, anyhow. Are
my
taste-buds getting insensitive?

A lot of bacon doesn't have much salt in it these days, either.

Yes, and so it doesn't keep. Made worse by the wholesale substitution
of water for salt.

I buy proper bacon, which if hung up in a lump soon grows a crust
of
salt crystals.

Ah, yum! About a twice-a-year treat for me, I'm afraid: but it makes
a very welcome Christmas present for favoured relatives. I never
actually got it together to cure my own when I had pigs: I'll regret
it for the rest of my life.


and over here we still have good old fashioned "Country Ham" which is VERY
salty and smoked and keeps forever. If there is a teeny bit of mold on it,
you just rinse it off and slice it and use it anyway. We slice and fry it
with breakfast and make "red-eye gravy" with the drippings of country ham,
leftover hunks and the bone are thrown into pots of either dried white or
pinto beans or green beans and cooked until any meat falls off the bones and
the marrow is dissolved..............then the dawgs get the bones to
gnaw......yummm, country ham isn't for the faint hearted. It IS salty! My
daddy used to send me a whole ham of country ham from the local pig farm
when we lived in Colorado because back then you couldn't find it. And he'd
also send me 10 pound bags of Martha White self rising cornmeal in white and
yellow because you couldn't find self rising yellow cornmeal. When I say I'm
Southern, I am really Southern..g (for New Year's the tradition is to
make a pot of black eyed peas with the ham bone from the Christmas ham, and
throw a silver dime into the pot of simmering peas. Whoever finds the dime
has good luck all year.........this was my FIRST year I didn't make a pot of
black eyed peas for News Year!) in my family, a pan of either cornbread or
golden brown "drop" bread to go with it slathered in butter hot from the
oven in a black iron skillet was the topper with the peas and ham pieces.

madgardener up on the butt cold ridge, back in frosty Faerie Holler,
overlooking English Mountain in Eastern Tennessee