A comfort with fat

I can't remember a time when I didn't love fat.

My family was working class, and meat with a starch covered in margarine was the centerpiece of the family meal. Vegetables came from cans and lettuce was iceberg and dressing was bottled and the veggie part of the meal never excited anyone's palate.

At the end of the month--especially when my milkman father was unable to collect all that was owed him from the people on his milk route--we ate beans and cornbread, and no one was happy about it.

But even then, fat was an essential ingredient as the beans were cooked with big chunks of ham fat or the bone left over from a baked ham.

Ham and bacon fat were religiously collected in separate containers to be used as "seasoning." The ham fat was kept in the fridge for more special occasions; bacon fat, less precious, was kept in a metal container on the stove, ready to be spooned into an iron skillet to cook eggs or stirred into cornbread batter or added to the canned vegetable du jour.

My mother tried to instill in me a horror of fat, but it was a hopeless effort. My father would spear the fat trimmed from our various meats and chew with gusto. I trimmed the biggest pieces for my dad but would always leave an unctuous margin on the edges for myself. Given my mother's generally indifferent cooking, I can now see that the fat was the tastiest part of our suppers.

Back in the day, barbecue sandwiches from Sonny Bryan's Barbecue (the original on Inwood in Dallas) came with the bottom of the bun dipped in barbecue grease. Those sandwiches were insanely good. I don't know when they stopped doing that, but I'm grateful because I could never resist such excess on my own.

During the many diets of my life, I have labored to reorient myself toward fat. I have tried to convince myself that fat is gross, that things taste better when they are fat-free. But I remain very affectionate towards fat.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that I made a mayonnaise-based remoulade this week. Mayonnaise holds no horrors for me, so I'm sort of surprised that I don't like it more than I do.

I used the Joy of Cooking recipe--the 75th anniversary edition since I gave my old edition to my daughter when she moved into her own apartment.

It's good because it's full of mayonnaise-y goodness and pretty much anything made with mayonnaise is good, but it's still disappointing, I have to say. It's sort of more like tartar sauce with tarragon than a good shrimp sauce. In fact, I figured it wasn't going to work with boiled shrimp as I wanted it to, so I lightly sauteed some tilapia filets and served the remoulade with it. The picture above shows the tilapia with a healthy dollop of remoulade, home grown black-eyed peas (MO and I didn't grow them, but we shelled them), and a salad featuring tiny yellow tomatoes purchased at the farmer's market.

Here's the recipe:

Combine:
1 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon minced cornichons or sour gherkins (I had to substitute dill pickles because I
couldn't find either in my teeny town)
1 tablespoon drained small capers
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped tarragon (OK, I used dried--but it's organic)
1 small garlic clove, minced
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
salt and black pepper to taste
(1 hard-boiled egg, finely chopped) This was optional but I had an egg already boiled in the
fridge so I opted to use it.

Unless you have a lot of people eating it, I recommend cutting the recipe in half, as I wish I had now that I have a big bowl of it in my refrigerator. This version certainly isn't my idea of the perfect remoulade, but I think it would be darned good on crab cakes (if I could get fresh crab in my rural East Texas town).

Tomorrow we're going to buzz it (per MO's suggestion) with some chipotle peppers and use it to dress fish tacos made with the leftover tilapia and some jicama slaw (another farmer's market purchase).

I have a feeling this remoulade is going to be in our fridge for quite a while unless I can figure out something else to do with it.

Of course you know what would it would be good on? Something fried. Fat, fat, and more fat.