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119 BILL ROORBACH My father taught us to love a snack. One of his favorites was crackers with peanut butter and horseradish, slice of sweet bread-and-butter pickle optional, about twelve crackers at a time, stacked precariously six-by-six on your palm on the way to the TV room. Or a whole celery stalk salted hard and filled with peanut butter, or cottage cheese, or anything, really, to add some fat to the vegetable. You never ate a little dainty triangle of watermelon, but cut the whole beast into halves, then quarters, and ate a full quarter melon no matter how big—with salt. Toastie pies required a toastie-pie maker, which was a clamp, basically, two long handles both ending in a large scallop shell. You buttered this copiously, put a piece of white bread on each shell, pressed the bread into the mold, filled the resulting depression with jelly (the exact amount for perfection being an art learned with practice, about four tablespoons), then clamped the thing shut and lay it over a burner on the stove long enough to brown both sides and seal the bread slices together. Dad loved breakfast, and made us love it, too. Breakfast was how you got the energy to start the day and then make it all the way to lunch. Pancakes, heated syrup (never the expensive maple stuff, but A&P brand), bacon or sausage links or both, scrapple when you could get it. Scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch specialty , multiple pig scraps, nicely seasoned. It came in a pound block like butter or lard and wasn’t far from those. My dad would slice it, dredge it in flour, drop it into a spider pan (as he called a cast-iron skillet) sizzling with old bacon fat (plenty of bacon fat—we kept a supply in a coffee can by the stove always). I kept a coffee can full of bacon fat by the stove through college, but at some point realized I never used it, partly because it was astoundingly disgusting , but also because I’d lost the art. But my dad—Depression-era guy—Dad used it for everything. One of his favorite breakfast items was biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were just flour and baking soda and a little salt with as many Recipe






















CH026.qxd 7/15/09 7:48 AM Page 119 120 BILL ROORBACH tablespoons of the bacon fat as practicable mixed into the batter. The gravy was the bacon fat, again, this time cooked down and thickened with flour, seasoned with a great deal of salt. This was pretty good alone, but with four or five or six eggs, well, wow. My dad’s hash browns were elegant, too. You grated raw potatoes into an enormous pile after peeling them. While you peeled them, you told stories about KP duty in the navy: mountains of potatoes to be peeled before you could go back to your hammock, the cook bombed on gallons of vanilla extract he’d ordered to get around the shipboard alcohol ban. Then onions, one for every four potatoes. Maybe peppers, if you had ’em, but only enough for a little color, and never the hot kind. And heat up a cup or so of the bacon fat, get it so hot it spits, drop the potatoes in a little at a time. More fat was always good as you went along, fry ’em till they’re brown, ketchup optional. And why eat toast when you could have French toast so easily? Simply dredge whatever stale bread you’ve got in beaten eggs—soak it good—a little cinnamon, a lot of sugar, bacon fat in that same spider pan, presto. Pie was good for breakfast, too, and when you ate it for breakfast, it wasn’t dessert, so didn’t count against any diet some doctor might have put the Old Man on. Once during one of those diets we kids looked out the kitchen window a floor above the driveway where Dad was vacuuming the VW beetle we had at the time. It was funny to see his bald head from above, and then funnier to see right down through the windshield as he slid a full-size Table Talk pie out from under the passenger seat, ate it whole with his hands. We called Mom. Dad was busted. Under the VW seat we found his stash—two more pies, and two- or three-dozen empty boxes...