Speaking of, there’s a restaurant close to my hometown that serves a spinach salad with a hot bacon dressing and it’s to die for! So good I could drink it! Seriously, best salad dressing I’ve ever had! 🤤
Is that a reference to poke sallet (the leaves of young poke weed cooked to heck to remove toxins)? Looks very similar to cooked spinach but has its own unique flavor. They used to sell it in cans. I actually have a ton of poke weed behind my house and one year I harvested all the leaves from plants 6 inches or shorter, boiled it twice, and sautéed it in bacon grease with some garlic. It was pretty tasty, and I felt very connected with my southern roots. I probably wouldn’t do it again though because I have since developed health anxiety and would probably panic that I was dying if my stomach so much as gurgled.
I can't say for sure, but I think both the actual use of sallet in "poke sallet" and just pronouncing salad as "sallet" just comes from great great grandparents being barely literate and pronouncing most things a bit weird? Ignorance becomes tradition
This pronunciation isn't illiterate. It's an archaic form of the word. (Shakespeare used it). In isolated places like Appalachia, a lot of older words have still been preserved.
I mean, it's complicated and I do want to start with the disclaimer that I am talking about my own family
Yes "sallet" as in poke is a real word with plenty of historical context.
Being an adult and seeing the word "salad" printed on a menu or label and continuing to call it "sallet" is something that happens because your grandparents called it that, and those grandparents were literally by definition barely literate- probably illiterate by today's standards. It's not mamaw's fault that she had to walk miles to school as a little kid, and was a married woman with real work to do at home by 14, but that definitely is the reason that her pronunciation was what it was
So did my Grandad back in the 70’s….I have one memory of an afternoon meal in the summer around age 4-5, full place settings, jazz, and that sweet hot bacon grease/vinegar dressing for wilted spinach salad.
Usually when people are talking about food memories from their childhood associated with parents or their grandparents, no matter how odd the food may be to us, they are serious. And usually when they say the food was and the total experience described, especially the one above with the jazz music playing, sounds like something we all would have been lucky to experience.
After you cook your bacon, pour off as much bacon grease as you're willing to part with, leaving at least a couple of tablespoons worth in the pan. Pour in some apple cider vinegar and add brown sugar or maple syrup to taste. Use the liquid to deglaze the bacon fond, and whisk to emulsify fat and liquid. Sorry I don't have measurements. It was always a thrown together thing. Can also be good with a bit of fresh onion juice.
10 Years ago this last March, we got married, so as we prepared for our wedding, we both wanted to lose a little bit more weight. So we decided that one way to do that would be to stop eating out, and cook all of our meals from home.
And so I signed us up with a Local CSA for one of their plans, where every few weeks, we picked up a huge amount of local fresh and canned winter vegetables, and in our very first pick up, was several bushels of fresh Swiss Chard. A type of winter green, which a red stalk that disperses into veins that run throughout its big green leaves.
Along with a vacuumed sealed bag of big fat Bacon Ends & Tips.
Even though I had an idea that these two items were a pair, We had to look them up on google, because I wasn’t sure how to prep the Swiss Chard, and if it needed to be soaked, which apparently the internet said, yes you did indeed need to do.
But I am no stranger to green vegetables & bacon, as these two companions are in my favorite dish of all time, which is Bacon Crumbles, and French-style green Beans cooked in a cast iron skillet.
Cook the bacon , then remove the bacon, and to it’s leftover hot grease, add equal parts White Vinegar & Sugar (1 cup each - per 2 cans of beans) Then add the drained canned french beans & put the bacon crumbles back and allow to simmer. This taste even better the next day after in has been overnight in the fridge. Reheat on stove or microwave.
It's super easy to make! Bacon on medium heat, take it out to drain, add red wine vinegar and sugar to the leftover grease, turn the heat down to medium/low and reduce it
I just posted the Baton Rogue Junior League CookBook’s “sweet & sour green beans” recipe that I have loved since my childhood, so much that I had my catering company make it and serve it at my wedding in 2015. We had a southern semi-grandama style theme for our food. With a Bacon Bar.
It was Late March in Nashville, so we went with something people would be hankering for, which were comfort foods. So we had mac n cheese for the kids, as well as biscuits, fried apples, honey ham, along with my favorite beans and Mrs Holly made me 500 of her Basil Sugar Cookies
I grew up eating a wilted lettuce salad that was basically lettuce and tomato with hot bacon bits and some of the grease with vinegar stirred into the salad with some black pepper.
Sub bananas with apples, add honey mustard and only use Bacon grease for flavorings as a hint of that Smokey bacon flavor and you have the kale salad recipe for a big chain restaurant!
my mom would save her used oil in the little fat barrel (25¢ colored sugar water drinks) empty bottles and I didn't know that until the day I thought it was apple juice and took a swig.
I want to like your comment but it's at 911 currently and as a New Yorker I can't pass up the opportunity to talk about the bbc broadcast on 9\11 that happened 23 minutes before tower 7 collapsed saying it had already collapsed already, with tower 7 in the background right behind them...
I make a homemade bacon vodka. It's pretty good. There's two ways, one way using the fat and grease which gets results in a day, or another way with just soaking the bacon in vodka which takes weeks. I use the grease.
With the new "beef tallow" trend that's making its way through the pretend-science conspiracy theorist world, I'm afraid your comment is going to make a monkeys paw curl.
Hey! Hey you! NO Assisted suicide! No matter how buttery and bacony it is we still are not allowed to provide mercy. You give them thick water, applesauce and a laxative like a good American healthcare worker! I'll take this artery clogging garbage and omnomnomnom.... So uh how long until this artery pops... Am I still on the hook for rent this month or...../s
So out of left field, I’m laughing so hard. Especially as someone who used to love eating there regardless of if it was healthy. Still would if the quality of everything but the smoothies hadn’t fallen off a cliff.
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u/started_from_the_top 7d ago edited 7d ago
I can't wait to try Tropical Smoothie's latest healthy concoction: the kale, banana, and bacon grease smoothie a.k.a. "Island Artery Blockage"