I’ll take “Things Measured by ‘a cuppa'”, Ken

UPDATE, 8/7/23: I have added a clarification below.

I’ve heard of a “cuppa joe”.

I’ve heard of a “cuppa cocoa”.

I’ve made many a recipe with a cuppa flour or a cuppa sugar.

This one, seen at the farmer’s market yesterday, was a new one:

Yup. A cuppa bacon!

For four bucks, you’d better believe I got one. And then The Wife, who had lingered at a previous stand, arrived and wanted some of my bacon! Did I give her any? Of course not! But did I give her four bucks so she could get her own and thus avoid any marital strife over a refusal to share bacon? You bet!

CLARIFICATION: OK, she didn’t exactly demand my bacon. She joined me as I was finishing my first piece of bacon, with two to go, and she noticed the Cuppa Bacon guy. I said, “Yeah, it’s really good!” That’s when she realized I was eating the bacon. She had seen me eating something, but she assumed it was the deep-fried dumplings I often get from a place two stalls down. I reached into my pocket for my money and said, “Do you want some?” She replied, “Yes!” and went to grab some from my cup. That’s when I said, “No, get one of your own! Here’s four bucks!” Because me having two pieces of bacon and her having one piece of bacon will do in a pinch, but if we can each have three pieces, well, that’s the stuff of which marital bliss is made.

The guy was cooking thick-cut bacon with maple syrup in a big pot. The point of this wasn’t actually to sell bacon; it was a demo for something called a “rocket stove”, which is essentially a three or four-foot tall pillar which houses burning fuel inside and chimneys all that heat out a relatively small opening at the top, resulting in a high, natural heat. I’m intrigued by the concept, actually, for applications like stir-frying; it’s hard to get the wok screaming hot enough in a household kitchen to really stir-fry properly. (At least, it’s hard to do it without smoke.)

Finally, the cuppa-bacon concept reminded me of one of the jokes in MAD Magazine‘s parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when astronauts Bowman and Poole are sitting down to dinner on the Discovery:

BOWMAN: I’ve brought you dinner: a glass of steak, a glass of potatoes, a glass of pie, and a glass of ice cream.
POOLE: Nothing to drink?
BOWMAN: Yeah, a piece of coffee!

This is mocking an actual thing in the movie, by the way. Astronaut food was always good for a few laughs in the 1960s!

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