Bacony Bliss

If yesterday was a disapporkment, then this evening was bacony bliss. Blessed with bacon from my brother (a life-long pork producer on a family farm) we partook of one of summer's great tradeoffs - the BLT. Summer is hot, overly bright for office cave-dwellers like myself, and definitely humid in Iowa. As one sister put it eloquently, "summer in Iowa is all about wet underwear."

But summer offers the key ingredient to the BLT available no other time... the locally grown, vine-ripened tomato. To avoid a stampede and general civil unrest, I will not reveal where these tomatoes were gathered, but will only say, they are the real deal. They smell intoxicatingly musky and offer a fruity firmness that cannot be duplicated by hot-house cultivars, valiant though their efforts are.

We matched those tomatoes with slowly-seared, crisp bacon, from my brother’s farm. His bacon is processed by a small town, Iowa locker, smoked gently, and sliced thick.

In my youth, these sandwiches were standard weekly issue starting with the first tomatoes in mid-July through early September. It’s hard to believe now, but I can remember days when I cringed at the thought of another Sunday evening with BLTs. This evening, those scents of smokiness mingled with the rosy, floral fruit flavors of a beefsteak tomato brought back memories of a simpler time in life.

Sentimentality washes aside with the mouth-feel presented by the snap of bacon against the juice from a fresh, ripe tomato as it floods through crunchy toast. There’s nothing quite like the mingling “stuff” that drips to the plate from a BLT as you eat it: some divine nectar formed of the salad dressing, salted pork, fresh black pepper, and tangy tomato that simply begs to be dipped into with edges of the crisply toasted bread or slurped off the plate in a fit of unrefined pleasure. Great BLTs, like corn-on-the-cob, barbequed ribs, or oysters-on-the-halfshell, tap into that primal ‘foodness’ of the communal feast or even further, if we would admit, to some animal joy of being consumed with their consumption.

While the BLT is a humble American sandwich found throughout the country, tonight was a reminder that the Midwest offers provincial delights often overlooked. Our faire is not unlike that of rural Mediterranean and western European cuisines for which we foodies are eagerly profess fondness. Simple dishes with fresh ingredients have long been the purveyance of Provence, Normandy, the coastlines of Italy & Greece. We correctly laud those traditions; let’s not miss the tasty stuff right under our noses either.

Best bites,
James