Vox Populi
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Gary Fincke: Schmaltz
My mother’s old bacon grease filled a jar
That sat among flour and sugar and salt
As if that unlabeled glass held one more
Kitchen staple. 100% fat,
100% thrift–the smoked flavor
Worked its way into eggs so we could eat
More meatless breakfasts. Or no eggs at all,
Just that grease, with green onions, reheated.
That meal took timing, taking the rye bread
To the barely hardened, sopping up schmaltz
Like uncles who drank coffee to cut it.
Such richness stayed overnight in the mouth
Where German melted into the English
Of memory, its sentimental schmaltz.
People my age were forgetting the waltz,
The fox-trot, and my father’s sad box step.
What would be left, my mother worried, when
Conventional dances were gone? When thrift
Was laughed at? And all those warnings about
Salt and fat, the satisfaction of grease?
Already there were complaints about Heinz,
The soups my uncles made. Pittsburgh was home,
Now, to high blood pressure and heart disease,
All the Germans fleeing to the suburbs
Where bacon was drained, salt never slathered
On the crisped skin of chickens. My mother
Said we could shimmy it off in no time,
Doing the Twist and the Mashed Potato,
The dances of the slim who’d never heard
Of real schmaltz and the terrible success
Of learning place, those who wouldn’t admit
To grandfathers who ate pure grease and lived,
Who’d punched in for fifty years and carried
The company’s gold watch to prove it.
~
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Gary Fincke. From The Necessary Going On: Selected Poems 1980-2025 (Press 53).
Gary Fincke is the recipient of multiple awards for his poetry, including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine and the Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore.
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This makes me smile. I do collect bacon grease from the bacon I still (somewhat guiltily) consume. Unlike my mother, though, I no longer toss a dollop of bacon grease into sundry dishes, week in and week out. But “willful waste makes woeful want,” as I was raised to say … so I freeze the metal cans once they are full, wait until I have five or six cans filled, then take them all to the Biofuel Oasis. It is a messy business to decant the contents into a huge container there, but eventually my bacon grease helps fuel someone’s vehicle. I had always thought the container was just for used vegetable oil, but the proprietors assure me bacon grease is every bit as useful. Grateful for Gary Fincke’s poem that has prompted all this reminiscing.
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I think it’s great that you are recycling your bacon grease, Annie.
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Oh, what a memory. When I was a kid, there was nothing. Not even Schmaltz. My father sent some when he could: melted down, poured into a metal military drinking flask, hardened again, melted again by my mother, hardened again, given to me on a piece of black bread. Oh. So. Delicious. I still dream about that moment which could never be recaptured.
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My wife’s parents were born in the 1930s in Westphalia near the Rhine. The years of fascism, the war, the bombings, the occupation… Klaus and Mia were wonderful people caught up when they were children in a terrible war. A slice of bread with bacon fat would have been a feast to them.
M.
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Yes, Michael, it would have been a feast for my parents as well (they, too, were children, born in Germany, in the 1930s).
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Fabulous. Period.
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thanks, Syd!
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Both grandmas had grease jars and bacon grease found its way into a lot of food. I remember long cooked green beans, and also skin salves and something rubbed on chests for coughs. I think we had grease jars when I was young, but they had disappeared by the time I left the house. One grandma came from Pennsylvania Dutch stock, one from the South, related to uncle somebody famous from the Grand Old Opry. She made mile high pies and I suspect large quantities of fat contributed to those magnificent pie crusts.
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Oh yes. The food tastes great. We didn’t know in those days that the food we ate would kill us.
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I love the poem in part because it reminds me of how my Irish-Cherokee grandmother, who grew up on a sharecropper cotton farm in Texas, used to fry bacon every morning and save the grease which she used during the day in her cooking. Bacon fat went into beans, vegetables, pie crusts… It made sense considering where she came from. Living one step from starvation makes you hoard calories wherever you can.
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Yes, my mom did the same thing when I was a kid. I shudder now at the thought of bacon grease but if I had expressed that thought to her she would have just have grinned and said, “Don’t be silly!”
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My grease jars have had symbiotic relationships with mold. It did its slow motion dances on their slick inner surface, taking advantage of nutrients the family avoided. Put a lid on the damn jar, my wife Pam, exhorted. So I did. Now a grease jar poem from Pittsburgh, where long gone joys return, like makin’ bacon instead of a meatless morning. But there’s a seriousness afoot in the schmaltz, too. So much poetic sizzle depends upon such a mundane jar.
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Lovely prose poem, Jim.
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Thanks for posting this one
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Love your work, Gary. I’m glad to see your new book of essays has been released by Madville. Looking forward to reading it.
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Thanks for writing it!
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I related to this poem through the bacon grease which was put in used jars. We used to put those greasy jars on the curb where, along with flattened tin cans, they were to be picked up for what I was told was “the war effort.”
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I always wondered what meat grease was used for…
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