Soft white fur … a twitching nose and bewitching whiskers … sensitive ears … an elegant tail … Yes, behold, your Little White Lab Rat is a beautiful creature! But all my sources indicate that another white rodent, whose long ears are floppy, whose big feet are hoppy, and whose tail, rather than being long and pink like mine, is stubby and hairy, has left too many boiled Easter eggs in the homes of Keepa’ninnies. Never fear – I shall help you dispose of them in the tastiest way imaginable!

Last month we looked at cookbook prepared by a YLMIA in 1920. One of the recipes in that book was for:

STUFFED EGGS

6 hard boiled eggs
4 slices bacon
Crumbs of 1 small cracker
Vinegar
Salt

Cut the eggs into halves, lengthwise. Dice the bacon and fry crisp. Rub the yolks to a paste with the diced meat, seasonings and drippings, form into balls the size of the yolk removed, and pack into the space from which they were taken. – Mrs. Juanita Black

Bacon?! Yes, please!

And even though the preparation is so simple it hardly needs to be illustrated, Little White Lab Rat thinks he has certain skills as a photographer, and aspires to his own cooking show, so he presents these lovely images:

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Eggs boiled, cooled, and peeled. Don’t I do a good job at removing shells?
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Bacon frying – can’t you just smell it? And yes, I know the recipe called for it to be diced first, but slices are so much prettier, and of course are easy to crumble after frying.
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See? Bacon crumbled, and hot bacon fat reserved. As it turned out, you’ll want to save some bacon fat even though the recipe doesn’t call for it — unless you drown your yolks in vinegar, there’s nothing else to hold the dry yolks and dry bacon together. Don’t like the idea of using bacon fat? Why not? You’re already planning on eating EGGS and BACON – and the fat is where all that wonderful flavor hides.
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Eggs cut, and yolks removed.
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Cracker crumbled – and an excuse to use Little White Lab Rat’s mother’s rolling pin. Oh, the cookies and pastries that have rolled from under that well-seasoned pin!  (Where were we? Oh, yes, cracker crumbs. The 1920 cracker variety was probably four times this size — if you don’t think your mixture is dry enough, or do think the cracker is enough to hold the paste together, by all means, add more.)
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Now comes the tricky part. Oh, of course there’s nothing tricky about mashing egg yolks and adding crumbled cracker and bacon … except for the difficulty of getting the bacon into the dish and not into Little White Lab Rat’s mouth! – but as usual, these aging recipes give no clue as to amounts – how much bacon fat? how much vinegar?

The answer to the vinegar, as I learned to my sorrow, is NOT MUCH. Maybe NONE AT ALL. The first batch had such a vinegary flavor that I lost all that wonderful bacon to an inedible mush … Even the second batch, with just a few drops, was not wonderful. Perhaps Little White Lab Rat simply enjoys the flavor of bacon without the pickle-y background taste of vinegar. In any case, if you use vinegar to be authentic to the recipe, start with only a drop or two. You can add more, but, alas, you cannot remove any.

The answer to bacon fat, is LOTS, added in small amounts. That’s where the flavor comes from, and it’s all you have to hold the crumbling egg yolk together. But you can see that even with LOTS of bacon fat, the paste is heavy and dry. It was easy to do as the recipe directed, to roll balls of the stuff. Stuff one egg and try it … and then you might do what I eventually did, which was pull out the mayonnaise to looseen up the mixture.
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But here we are with the eggs made as the recipe directed – with vinegar, without mayonnaise. Pretty, no? And what’s not to love?: BACON. In your stuffed eggs. BACON!
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Voila! Easter eggs disposed of.