I was not surprised when I was pulled aside by the TSA in the Sacramento airport, and I had my story down. “That’s my lunch,” I said of the two pints of pickled corn relish pulled from my backpack by the agent, who eyed me with a combination of skepticism and disinterest. My stolid proclamation — or the lack of time and energy to pursue it any further — led her to wave me through. It really could have been my lunch, but, the truth was, I was carrying the homemade relish back to Kansas to give to my mom.
So many trips back and forth over the years, and I ponder the things I carried, both going and coming, more often than not involving food.
From Kansas, I’ve carried fried and frozen morel mushrooms (to be re-fried in California), freshly baked cinnamon rolls (nearly absconded with by a shuttle driver), honey, jams and jellies.
Once, before all the flight restriction hullabaloo, I carried two dozen freshly laid hen eggs in cartons in a brown paper bag through the Las Vegas airport, slot machines jangling around me.
I’ve carried Madeleine and donut pans and strange ingredients, like a pound of mint gumdrops, for baking projects in my mom’s kitchen; and returned from Kansas with everything from the homecoming gifts of chicken dish towel-and-oven mitt sets to a food scale and an heirloom cast iron skillet.
I carried two glass Fire King loaf pans, treasures found in an Abilene antique mall, through Chicago, where I was made to check them due to the size of my carry-on duffle bag, about a third the girth of most of the behemoth suitcases being rolled on board. If the pans had arrived broken (they did not), I would have really held a grudge.
Still, I also carried back, in my checked luggage, a set of steak knives, extras my dad had received through some sort of giveaway.
And oh, the many different flours, both going and coming, that I carried — almond and coconut flours, going, to make a favorite cake; whole wheat flours ground at various Kansas mills on the return. And the cracked wheat cereal my mom made in the blender from “Nancy’s Funny Farm.”
To Kansas, I’ve carried in my pockets, starts of rosemary plants, peach, apricot, plum and even cherimoya pits (from which my mother grew a cherimoya tree dominating the dining room window). I’ve returned from Kansas with feathers and shocks of wheat, live shamrock plants and leaves from family oak, maple and cottonwood trees, as well as strings of cottonwood seeds, fluffy stuff protruding.
Perhaps being borne of people who didn’t travel, or my own pack rat tendencies, I am a traveler always overstuffed with things and, despite unloading gifts of coffee beans and salted cashews for family, I always ended up returning to California with more than when I came — like five pounds of cheese.
Usually the day I left Kansas, one or both of my parents, not really understanding the load limits of flight (though you’d think my dad, a former paratrooper, would have had some inkling), encouraged me to take a can or package and “stick it somewhere in your suitcase.”
I’m not sure when I first started carrying, in one of my checked bags, a pound of bacon from my parents’ freezer. I may have mentioned I liked the brand my mom made, and my parents insisted I take some, hard-frozen and wrapped in a plastic grocery sack, buried in my clothes. Unless there were flight delays, the bacon survived each time still nearly frozen. It became almost a superstition that I HAD to carry this smoked and fatty talisman for a safe return. And a chuckle when I saw that my suitcase had been “inspected.”
People are traveling more, following the pandemic, I’m happy that they are happy to take flight. I remain grounded, recalling my last visit to Kansas and a traumatic turn at the TSA in a small Kansas airport. I was returning to California carrying a broken heart, a rolling pin and a recipe box. My backpack was pulled aside, the rolling pin held aloft and declared a weapon (using classic cartoons as the guidelines). No one considered that I could have just as easily clonked somebody in the head with the recipe box and done equal damage.
“No!” I cried, silencing the area, as the three-generations-of-dough pin was manhandled by gloved agents. I would have abandoned my trip without it. Despite my pleas to not wield it or to add it to my already checked bags (still visible on the tarmac), I had to pay a human-sized fee to check the rolling pin separately, and sit on the edge of my seat the entire way back to California until it was in my hands again.
And then I realized, this time, I had been traveling without the bacon.
Maple-Bacon Granola
Rebecca Howard grew up in Kansas and currently writes the food blog, “A Woman Sconed.”