Re: Mrs. DIXON cooking over open fire


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Posted by Peter H on April 17, 2005 at 21:23:08 from 81.158.212.45 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: Mrs. DIXON cooking over open fire posted by Eric Abraham on April 17, 2005 at 14:09:56:

I can live with a literal interpretation of Mrs Dixon holding a frying pan over the fire to fry bacon. Three reasons:

1) The bacon would have almost certainly been fairly locally produced and home-cured. The bacon commonly used today is industrially processed and pressure-wrapped. Now I am not an expert on the history of bacon (any more than I am an expert on the history of C of E bishops), but from memory I reckon that farmhouse bacon is quicker to fry because it contains no water (all processed meats do) and is fresher and therefore more tender.

2) Mrs D would know that frying bacon over a wood fire (I assume it was) would give it a slight smokey taste which would be appetising.

3) It would not take long, so her arm would not tire. Railway locomotive drivers in the steam days told true stories of frying bacon in the firebox on a scrubbed shovel. It didn’t take long. Whether the taste of coal smoke enhanced it, I don’t know, but on a cold day I doubt if anyone worried.

(BTW, I can personally remember toasting bread and pikelets etc on the coal fire at home when a child, with an old brass ‘toasting fork’. We could have done them on the gas grill, but somehow they tasted better when toasted before the fire. There is a kind of cosiness about it, which there is also about the image of Mrs Dixon frying up on the fire. It’s a lovely old-world image, and Ed, I ask you to accept it!)




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