Up Yours, Mr. Phillips!!!

   Bittersweet news: our Bacon of the Month saga is coming to a close. I’d almost decided never to bother writing about bacon again. Then my son, who’d slipped into the bed during the night woke me up early by kicking me in the nuts…a lot. His slender boy foot was like keen-edged garden shovel trying to chisel off my scrotum. Naturally I thought Elisa was behind the assault so I made a heavy armed swat for her – nothing but pillow. Where the hell was my wife’s head? She was no longer in bed so she must’ve taken it with her.  Leading to a new sense of terror: if there was nobody in bed with then there must be something smaller and extra dangerous in there like a badger. Aw crud, not another badger trying to castrate me – that’s just no way to wake up. I leapt from the covers to discover the legs of sideways-lying Jack under them. I growled, hissed and spit on the floor and headed down for coffee and an ice pack.

  In the den, sack trauma became amplified by AV agony.  Elsie was watching a Disney music DVD. Hannah Montana and some High School Musical twinks and…The Jonas Brothers. I should not be getting my undies all bunched up over studio stamped acts and molded mediocrity, but with my jimmies in a sling the videos were just pouring sour milk and fish heads into my mood.  Precisely the frame of mind I need to finish the story about the Bacon Of The Month. 

   The first chapter had been such an enthralling passage of bliss, plumbing the depths of human rapture in a swirling sea of smoky rainbows. It had been so promising,  a story to make one weep under the crushing beauty of magnificently cured pork. Then it just made us cry from repeated tangles in the unexpectedly ugly underbelly of the bacon universe. Fists caked with acrid hickory ash bashed us in the nose and salt-encrusted boot heels snapped through brittle teeth to crush our windpipes.  Occasionally the tragic violence relented as vicious thugs were replaced here and there by coarse hustlers or a kindly old gents from New England, but that initial thread of ecstasy was never to be recovered. It was a sour story, one with barely a trace of satire and certainly one without hope. What better way to end it than through a flat denouement sliding under the frayed curtains of a musky conclusion. 

Thus, Newsom’s Old Mill Store Hickory Smoked Country Bacon: The US Post Office had recently relinquished the bacon delivery stewardship to a competitor so when the UPS dude leapt off the truck with this month’s package he was beaming with delight

   “Bacon of the Month? That’s got to be one of the greatest ideas I’ve heard in a long time!”

   “You’d think, right?” I said in a deflated grumble and then hollered out to my boy in the yard “Hey Jacko! Bacon of the Month is here – wanna cook it up and eat right now?”

   “Nope!” He ran back to his John Deere truck then stopped to ask, “You’re not going to eat it are you, Dad?”

   “Wow,” came the stunned reaction from the delivery guy, “He doesn’t like bacon?”

   “Loves it, actually.  It’s just that this club really blows.  It’s made us all very afraid…” 

   Taste-wise, Newsom’s didn’t offer much to talk about, good or bad. The salt was tolerable, the meat was chewy and though it was oversmoked we’ve had that sort of shit come through the mail so often it barely merits mention now. Dan Phillips, the BOTM’s Bacon Queen-in-Chief, apart from describing the Newsom’s experience as being “like a bacon virgin, touched for the very first time”, called the stuff silky. And that seemed to have everything to do with the fat. Though no fattier than any other bacon, the lipid strips here seem to hang onto to their character through cooking. You wind up biting into hot, densely gelatinous slats which release a kind of thick grease plasma over your tongue. Silky? Not so much. Weird? Yeah, sort of.

    The packaging had pretty much suggested that we were in for a less than optimal experience. Another black and white label done in a not so crisp fashion. Musta been stamped on one of dem ol’ timey Country Inkjets. It isn’t that we’re label whores over here or that I feel pretty wrapping affects the flavor of food. I have dirty food crushes with neighborhood shops all over creation and never questioned why their sausages, banh cuon or breads didn’t come in slick take-home clothes. But those are local joints, thriving on quality in their immediate neighborhood and by word of mouth in the district. But once an operation feels the need to go national, or at least regional, it’s time to revamp the logos and the labels.  Even a smokehouse needs to show an unfamiliar consumer that it’s so confident in its meat that it’s willing to spend a little to snazz it up in slick vacuum wrap. Find yourself a fancy little butchery or an uppity supermarket and you’ll score really good craft bacons already in place, made by folks who already know what I’m trying to say. My archnemesis Alex brings several astounding slabs to the annual Falmouth Bethapalooza drinky extravaganza we go to, bought locally, and I’ve thought about her magic breakfasts every time I’ve stuck one of the BOTM’s taste tortures in my mouth.  Why the hell isn’t Dan Phillips offering better stuff? It’s certainly a pricey little gimmick not to be providing the best of the pork belly world.

   But this isn’t a blog about marketing strategies and lord knows the last thing I want is someone from Newsom’s or Johnson’s or even Dan Phillips himself stumbling across such advice and taking it to heart. There just ain’t space on the local hoity toity meat shop for their bland to baleful crap. And considering what I’ve eaten during the last six months I get the feeling Phillips and his Grateful Palate/BOTM sham isn’t really looking to expand the profiles of his gritty little clutch of ham houses. With one or two shiners like Vande Rose Farms and North Country Smokehouse, he can fill the rest of the year’s offering with cruddy, small town bacon products that he can score cheap and sell high, promising those little hayseed bacon makers a little “national exposure” in the process. Even that Koloszvari bacon brick, though interesting, wasn’t even a shining example of the Hungarian style. It was produced by a Midwest version of, say, Fall River’s Gasparo’s – stuffers of midgrade Portuguese chourico, linguica and body parts*. If you’ve never had chourico or Hungarian bacon, then those makers are somewhat reliable ways to begin appreciating the meats. But there are far away, wicked awesomer, versions out there. Since one would probably have to go to Illinois or Wisconsin to get the best Koloszvari, The Salt Cured Princess Dan Phillips should really be trying to offer one through his club. But his whole organization doesn’t exist for you or me or for really instilling an honest appreciation of bacon culture across America. The truth seems to be that The Grateful Palate and it’s polio-stricken, bastard child BOTM, are merely gimcrack profit machines. If you stop by the website, please say something nasty for me and my bacon-abused family… 

By the way…Shaw’s (the supermarket chain) Low Sodium store brand bacon?  Not bad at all.  Nothing all that cool either, but for those of us with questionable blood pressure it still goes nicely into a BLT.  Or a Bacon Burger with bacon fat mixed into ground turkey and topped with a fat slice of Dill Havarti! 

* Yay! A sidestory! Gasparo’s treated me to this exotic chourico ingredient one afternoon back in Somerville: A thumbnail. Big one too! A thick, angular crescent of human nail complete with ridged striations and the whole arc of the yellowy-white tip.  What a surprise to pull that out of where it wedged in my teeth. Jim Dandy!  I eat Portuguese sausages with extreme trepidation nowadays.