Bringing Home The Bacon
You know what’s really funny? Bill Kristol (Irving’s boy), William Safire, George Wills and their “ilk” (that’s a word they seem to favor, I prefer “minions”) prattling on about “elitist liberals.” Their asses are so tight they have to check the OED to decide whether they need to defecate or edulcorate.
Or go sightless.
Having said that, it's been said already, so we need to maintain our appetites and our sense of humor, so I offer this pleasing sight of freshly cut hog jowl. Yeah, lardo is “hot” right now with elitist liberal chefs like Mario Batali. Well, lardo isn’t really hot, in the sense of temperature, in fact it’s kinda “cool,” and I don’t know for certain that Mario is an elitist liberal. I’ve never heard him say that you need to have group prayers before each meal if you want to get the NASCAR Dads, Security Moms, and their Texas Textbook Kids to frequent your eating establishment, but then I’ve never heard him say that it should be the sow’s choice whether you serve suckling pig there either. So I don’t know for sure whether he is a liberal elitist chef or a deluded neocon chef. I suppose it does matter to some people, but maybe he only really cares about making good food.
I do know I learned the term guanciale from him. Yeah, thanks, Mario. Hog jowl used to be dirt-cheap and a secret gourmet treasure, like chicken wings before they soared with the adjective “Buffalo.” Maybe that’s a proper noun that modifies, I dunno, it is a part of the chicken anatomy that brought comfort to a few geographically-challenged people terminally bored with lake effect snow, craving “hot” in the capsaicin sense, and wings caught on fire. Some pancetta is also cured to be hot in this sense, but not nearly as hot.
Guanciale shouldn’t be confused with ordinary pancetta (to make your own pancetta, read here) made from pork bellies. Guanciale is made from the hog’s jowl and it’s dreadfully expensive. Hog jowl, on the other hand (at this point I ask you to visualize your hands on the anterior cheeks of a pig as you mentally weigh the contrast), is a lightly smoked chunk of hog fat that was usually cast off by plantation owners to be cherished by their “employees.” It is only natural that inflation should rear its ugly cheekless head at those who cherish it most - contented workers earning low incomes. So I’m not complaining that Mario made hog jowl more expensive; it’s the accelerating socioeconomic stratification and submissive compliance of the exploited masses that causes me to momentarily gripe. It’s unfair, certainly, but not necessarily a recipe for disaster.
My recipe for the hog jowl is a soft rendering followed by draining, leaving a couple tablespoons of fat in the skillet to sauté chopped onion. These ingredients will be kneaded into some ground buffalo meat (no lake effect, no capsaicin – bison) and fried in the same skillet, dressed with Tabasco (capsaicin hot) and Worcestershire sauce (no lake effect there – ocean), and served up with some grits.
6:53:07 PM 
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