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.

Sorry the focus is lacking…I was trying to manipulate my phone camera with one hand while holding my bacony goodness with the other. I was only partially successful.

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!