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The first recorded user of the expression was Mrs Gans, mother of Joe. He was a famous boxer at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the first native-born black American to win a world title. That was in 1900, when he was 26. Six years later he fought Oscar “Battling” Nelson in Goldfield, Nevada, now virtually a ghost town but then a booming community, the largest in the state. The match has been rated as the greatest lightweight championship bout ever contested, whose fame has endured enough that its centenary was recently marked in the area.

This is the way the crucial linguistic moment was reported in the Reno Evening Gazette for Monday, 3 September, 1906:

The following telegrams were read by Announcer Larry Sullivan. Gans received this from his mother: “Joe, the eyes of the world are on you. Everybody says you ought to win. Peter Jackson will tell me the news and you bring back the bacon.”

Various stories say that after he won the fight (it ended in Gans’s favour after 42 rounds when his opponent hit a low blow and was disqualified) he sent a telegram back to his mother in Baltimore: “Bringing home the bacon”. Other reports claim that what he really said was that he wasn’t only bringing back the bacon but the gravy, too. These are probably later elaborations of what clearly soon became a widely known story.

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Originally posted by Geoff:
It's used in the bible as far back as Deuteronomy, 4:3, in a symbolic sense.

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Your eyes have seen what the LORD did because of Baalpeor: for all the men that followed Baalpeor, the LORD thy God hath destroyed them from among you.

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8:3 And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.

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Being a heavenly food, the manna contained nutritious matter only, without any waste products, so that during the whole time the Israelites lived upon it the grossest office of the body remained unexercised.

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The manna was adapted to the taste of each individual; to the adult it tasted like the food of the adult, while to the sucking child it tasted like the milk of its mother's breasts. By wishing, one could taste in the manna anything desired, whether fowl or fruit; thus the statement that the people ground it, or pounded it, and then baked it (Num. xi. 8), is only figurative, for if one so wished it tasted like food made of flour ground or pounded, baked or cooked.

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According to a different interpretation, the wicked were compelled to grind it and prepare it until it was fit for food, while for the righteous it was ground by angels before it fell from heaven.

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# Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself, either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)

# They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled grade-A), and butter — no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timber, depending on how thick you slice it.

# They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.

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A shmoo (plural: shmoon, also shmoos) is a fictional cartoon creature.

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The studio might take a cue from the cartoonist Al Capp, who twisted the offending word into shmoo, which was a further revision of the euphemism schmo.

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Originally posted by tinman:
Wordcrafter (6 years ago, March 28, 2004) said, "Al Capp modified 'shmo' to create the shmoo character in his L'il Abner comic strip."

Recent articles in The New York Times and San Francisco Sentinel, talking about the movie Dinner for Schmucks (due to be released July 30, 2010), include this line:

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The studio might take a cue from the cartoonist Al Capp, who twisted the offending word into shmoo, which was a further revision of the euphemism schmo.

Schmo (or shmo) is a euphemism for schmuck.

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Originally posted by tinman:
shmue. "a taboo Yiddish term for the female reproductive organ, the ultimate fertility symbol."