My Old Fashioned Life: The Grease Can

Growing up on a hog farm we ate a lot of pork products. Ham, sausage, bacon, roasts -- you name it, we ate it.


As you know, most pork products tend to produce a lot of grease when cooked. Most of our meals contained some sort of fried meat, usually pork. After cooking the meat we would pour the grease into the grease can that was kept towards the back of the stove. We added to the can, (which was usually just an old coffee can) daily for months on end. It's possible we had up to one year's worth of grease in that can. Our grease cans didn't last much more than a year because by that time they were really gross. Just six month's worth of grease isn't gross at all. Yeah, right.

In the summer months the grease was really soft and partly melted due to the heat. This semi-soft grease was much less appetizing than the hard grease from cooler weather. Sometime in August the can got to be too gross so we threw it out and started a new one.

Why did we save all that grease? Glad you asked.

We ate fried potatoes at least once a day for my entire childhood. To go about making fried potatoes you first spoon out 3 or 4 tablespoons of grease from the can and melt it in a skillet and add the diced potatoes. We also used a healthy dose of the accumulated grease to fry eggs each morning.

When we ran out of butter, we used grease in biscuits. My mom didn't really like to use grease for biscuits because it altered the flavor and texture in a negative way. But, you use what you have -- that was like our family motto. In the summer we grew bushels and bushels of tomatoes. July through August we ate BLT's at least twice a week. We each got one piece of bacon for our BLT and that was it. If anyone wanted seconds you dipped your toast directly into the hot bacon fat to get the bacon flavor for your BLT (and then applied a liberal amount of Miracle Whip). My dad came up with the idea of doing this one night. I remember we were all so excited we could have another BLT with bacon flavor, instead of just a lettuce and tomato sandwich.

An interesting observation:

Growing up every member of our family ate fat in unbelievable quantities, as evidenced by the toast dipped in bacon fat and then spread with another layer of fat (the Miracle Whip). We also consumed all sorts of foods that are deemed unhealthy by today's standards. It's interesting to note that none of us had a weight problem. My parents never had any kind of heart problems. Now that the children are all grown and "know better" we try to eat healthier. However, several of us have weight issues now.

In case anyone asks, I do not keep a grease can today for the following reasons:

#1 All that grease repulses me
#2 I don't cook anything that generates that much grease
#3 I don't fry anything that would need that much grease to cook

Up next in our Old Fashioned Life series I will share all about Chores. Have you missed the other installments of Old Fashioned Life? Click here to read more.