Cheese Grits and Raw Bacon

Grits. Baked cheese grits to be exact. With bacon bits added for the first time. Cheese grits are a McBride family holiday tradition going back forty years. Some December back in the early 1970’s when Nita and I were childless newly-weds, my mother served cheese grits at Christmas. They stuck, so to speak. 

In the ‘80’s our pre-teen sons loved the dish, probably because grits are not green. In the ‘90’s our teenage sons loved the cheese grits because…well, what’s not to love? The dish is butter, milk, and cheese held together by a tasteless white grain, and it has no nasty little bits of green pepper or onions that deterred our sons from eating meat loaf when they were kids. Or now.

In 2014, the venerable baked cheese grits dish reached a new high with the add-on of six strips of crisp crumbled bacon.  After all, since bacon is the new chocolate, why not add it to everyone’s favorite dish of sin. We’ve already twice made and served bacon enhanced cheese grits this season, and have been directed by our 30-something year old sons that grits are expected on Christmas Eve.  And we’re not arguing.

If you want the recipe for Mama McBride’s cheese grits with value-added bacon, just shoot me an e-mail. I promise your dog won’t have much licking to do to clean the bowl after your human holiday feast.

Speaking of bacon and my book in progress, I am this week writing about a march made by my soldier characters in mid-February in a snowstorm.  This bit is real history, and I’m using a couple of primary source memoirs to keep my account accurate, while putting my characters into the middle of it. That’s the fun of writing historical fiction. I get to plug fictitious characters into well-documented historical events. 

In this chapter as in the real event, the men are not given time to cook their issued rations. Instead, after a freezing cold night trying to sleep wrapped in wet wool blankets in the open, they resume their trek, munching on “sea crackers” and raw bacon pulled out of their haversacks. We don’t munch on raw bacon these days. Rather, the whole scenario of marching and sleeping in the open in mid-winter in crappy weather and eating raw bacon makes a good reminder of just why two Civil War soldiers died of accident, exposure, or disease for every one soldier killed in combat. Bad water and spoiled meat killed far more soldiers than did lead bullets or exploding cannon shells.

For those with a military bent, in real life a captain, who normally  only commanded a single infantry  company of some fifty men, was ordered by Major General Hood to lead a column of some one thousand broken-down and exhausted stragglers the last ten miles, while most of the division went ahead.  Because of the extremely poor condition of the stragglers, the captain was given three days to make the short march. Ten miles was about half what a large column of Civil War soldiers were accustomed to marching in one day, so being given three days to go ten miles is indicative of the sad condition of the straggling troops.

As a novelist who wants to include the march in my story, I’m left to sort out why General Hood dipped so far down into his command structure to select this officer, the real-life man who inspired my main character, John McBee, to lead a thousand-man column. Why did Hood pick a lowly captain to lead a thousand stragglers? Why not a major or a colonel with experience commanding such a large body of men? On the other side of that coin, did the captain accept the assignment as a compliment, or as an insult that his first command beyond his own company would be a bunch of limping, hurting men who couldn’t keep up? 

I’m finding that getting into the heads of historical characters is a honey-trap for writers of historical fiction. It’s fun to guess at a famous man’s motivation for a decision, but it’s also risky because not every reader will agree with my interpretation and may not find the resulting actions as credible to the famous person. But adventure novels are all about getting our guys and gals into honey traps and back out again. There’s a bit of James Bond or Emma Peel in most of our main characters.

Talk to you next week. Happy shopping.