Bacon Scrapins – “Horse Pucks and Cow Patties”
Bacon Scrapins are the little bits of meat left in the greasy fry pan. They’re tasty, but the ‘nutrition’ needs searching for. This tale is a bacon scrapin.
In the late 1950s in Roxboro, then still an independent suburb of Montreal, we used to get a lot of snow. The driveway banks were higher than an adult’s head and made good take-off points for toboggans into the roadway. “Yes mom, we’re watching for cars!” You could still do that stuff in those days. We also still had the quickly expiring remnants of delivery services – bread or milk I can’t remember which – by horse and wagon.
The town would save money by plowing streets only when absolutely necessary, and only after it had been already hard-packed by cars anyway. They’d just scrape the top off, leaving the hard-packed snow that was hard enough to skate the 6 blocks from our back stairs to the outdoor rink.
After school, we’d get 4 to 8 kids together and meet on the ice-hard, snow-packed street in front of one of our houses to play road hockey. We didn’t wear skates, just rubber snow boots. Chunks of snow were the goalposts. Rubber pucks were too valuable to lose in the snow banks so we’d use a frozen apple or orange for a puck. But we were not very accurate shooters and these ‘pucks’ too would frequently disappear into snow banks, never to be found again until spring.
Not wanting to quit playing until a mother yelled at us to get home for supper, and being resourceful, we would resort to using ‘horse pucks’. Frozen horse droppings. Not for the hoity-toity or those of refined tastes, but they worked well enough. And it wouldn’t take long to find another one somewhere on the street.
I was looking carefully through the 2022 edition of the New Hamburg Fall Fair booklet, “Back to our Roots”. I scanned down the list of Home Crafts: hay, grain, vegetables, flowers, potted plants. I recognized some categories from walking beside my wife at the garden centre. The Culinary Arts list made my tongue draw a couple of appetizing circles to dry my drooling lips. The Leisure Arts list brought back memories of gifts for our babies from aunts and grandmothers.
The Antiques, Vintage and Collectibles category made me pause. My internal self-concept says an antique is something really old. Really, really, really old! Something from a couple of generations older than me – at least. I think they made a printing error in the booklet. The booklet says an Antique is at least 70 years old (1949). Are they kidding? I was coming out of diapers around that time. I’m no Antique! Am I? My brows were furrowed, and my exhalations were grumbled mumbles, at this definition.
I flipped ahead a few pages looking to change the subject, hopefully involving tractors, automobiles, horses or wagons. Along the way, a high-lighted area again froze my search. The title said, “Cow Patties”.
Cow Patties? “Really?”, I thought, as my memory latched onto visions of road hockey and “horse pucks”, but maybe larger and flatter.
With great relief and admiration for whoever, it was who invented the name for such a delicious recipe, I confirmed to myself that I’ve got to find a parking spot somewhere in town that weekend.
I’ve got to see this for myself. Real, live. Up close and personal. I know that there will be no odour resemblance, but I’ve got to see if there’s any visual resemblance between ‘Cow Patties’ and ‘horse pucks’.
What are you going to the New Hamburg Fall Fair to see?
NOTE: Characters in the Bacon Scrapins tales are fictional.
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