What to do with sausage fat?

 

You can’t bin it. You can’t pour it down the sink. And it feels somehow wrong to pour it in the flowerbed. Percy Thrower, you imagine, would roll in his horticulturally magnificent grave.

I once attempted to solve this problem by pouring the fat from several grilled sausages into a glass jar, which I planned to empty out once the fat had solidified. I forgot about it until, days later, my mother announced that she had discovered a mysterious extra bottle of beeswax polish.

Ah, I said. That’s not polish. That’s sausage fat. Unfortunately my insight came too late for my mother’s bannisters.

The bannisters had never looked better. Or smelled quite as meaty.