A big ol' pan of fat

The shortage of fat in World War II was often got around by the presence of a frankly disgusting pan of fat. The idea was to fry everything in a single pan, thus collecting the run-off fat each time. This fat was then kept, congealed, until it was needed next time.

The pan provided a useful source of dripping - bacon and other fat that you can dip toast or bread in as a tasty alternative to plain, tasteless margarine (there wasn't enough butter to waste on toast). And the fat keeps - regular boiling and congealing kills off most nasties, and anything that did turn could be scraped out, leaving the bulk of the fat available.

There's no other way of saying this: this practice is disgusting. It looks disgusting, it smells disgusting and it is, to 21st century minds, disgusting. And I'm starting my fat pan today, when CJBS has his bacon sandwiches for lunch. The pan will likely be vital toward the end of January, when fat will be hard to come by.

Edit: CJBS didn't want bacon cooked in a frying pan (only grilled), although he did offer his bacon rinds for further use (?) so I've made a start on a vegetarian fat pan instead, beginning with some baking marg and some vegebacon. This'll be very useful for me in late January...

A question of waste

Earlier this week I reposted this Food Flash from the Ministry of Food. As usual with these pithy 20-second cinema shorts, it was informative without lecturing. And it occurs to me that we should be seeing similar stuff on TV and online now.

The modern recycling campaigns, aimed at young people, are all very well. But recycling is the final option, not the first one. When my mum cooks, she uses virtually everything for something (and online I've discovered that onion skins can be used for stock making; and even potato skins can be fried for crisps if you're desperate enough, although this idea came from someone writing about their experiences of Berlin in the winter of 1945 where things were indeed desperate; the same site appears to have a recipe that requires you to throw away the potato and keep only the skins, which makes me weep). I'm always much more slapdash. The top third of a leek is often mud-filled; it's so much easier to cut it off, throw it away and cook the tight white part alone. Onion skins are easiest to remove if you allow the top layer(s) of onion to be sacrificed with them. Virtually everything fresh has a part that could be used and I throw it away for convenience.

With luck, this experiment will purge me of such foolish notions. I'm supposed to be an environmentalist, yet with no garden and "no time" (made available), I happily throw away tremendous amounts of off-cuts.

Now, that's not as bad as throwing away edible food, or the slightly greater sin of throwing away food that has been over-bought and allowed to go off. But it's still waste and it's still foolish.

So even if this experiment doesn't work, or stops on January 31 with a trite post about how hard it was, what I really want is to walk away with a sense that every scrap has some value somewhere.