Razor Sharp

I do believe in every household kitchen that I have ever encountered there is a drawer of kitchen knives. With a few exceptions in all of those drawers all of those many, many knives are dull and nasty. Some of those knives have saw- like serrated edges to awkwardly and laboriously hack through an onion rather than elegantly and cleanly slice it.

The truth is: this past Thanksgiving millions of American men hacked through their Thanksgiving turkey with an electric “carving” knife. A Milwaukee Tool Sawzall would have been more manly, more elegant, and with the right blade would have done a better job.

In all the drawers of all the dull knives only four items are needed to make everything right: a six or seven in boning knife, an eight or ten in French chefs knife, a stone and a steel. Also needed is an accurate judgment of 22^o.  22^o is the dynamic angle that one draws the knife blade over the stone and steel to maintain an edge. The steel straightens the edge. The stone sharpens it. Diamond stones do quick work.

This maintenance isn’t time consuming. A short visit with the steal once or twice a week usually does it. And ten minutes with the stone two or three times a year will keep household knives razor sharp.  

This brings me to the topic of razors and shaving. While this has nothing directly related to cooking, it has all to do with the household economy. For over 30 years, I have been had by Gillett. They have moved me from the injector razor, to the costly twin edge cartridge razor and are now trying to seduce me into buying cartridge razors with edges stacked four or five, one upon the other. They promise a smoother, closer shave. They gain a $150 a year razor cartridge customer. It’s a scam.

My son gave me an old fashion single blade safety razor on Thanksgiving. He said they give a better shave and the blades cost about a buck apiece and last for a month. I somewhat nervously tried it out the next day. With the exception of a few nicks, he was right. After two mornings I had it mastered.

Sunday he stopped by for dinner. I told him the razor worked well and found I had been scammed again.

Then I think I’ll get one, he said. I thought I’d use your face for my testing ground.

Fabulous Potato Pancakes and "the Smell Test"

Growing up we regularly had potato pancakes for super. Served simply with apple sauce and a few breakfast sausage links, they were one of my favorites and remain part of my food heritage and culture. Potato pancakes are a common dish in Germany and throughout Eastern Europe, and like many of the foods I eat, reflect on my ethnicity. Such is the enculturation power of the kitchen table. More on that a bit later.

Here is the recipe for Fabulous Potato Pancakes. It's my own and they are fabulous.

2 Large russet potatoes

1 handball sized onion, minced

1 egg

2 oz. cream or milk

2 oz. water

3 heaping Tbs. flour

½ tsp. salt

¼ tsp. baking powder

¼ tsp. pepper

Butter for frying (vegetable oil if you feel you must)

Grate the potatoes into a bowl of water. In a separate bowl dissolve the baking powder in 2 oz. of water, then add the cream, egg, salt and pepper and beat together.

Squeeze as much of liquid as possible from the potatoes then add, along with the minced onion, them to the egg mixture. Thoroughly mix, then gradually mix in the flour until the liquid is the consistency of a light batter.

Melt butter in a medium high to high skillet and drop heaping tablespoon of the potato mixture into the skillet, flatten and brown to a crispy golden brown on both sides.  Because these are fried in batches, hold the cooked pancakes on a sheet pan and wire rack in a 300^o.

Fabulous Homemade Applesauce

2 large apple, pealed, cored and cut into bite sized chunks

½ to 1 cup of apple cider

¼ cup apple butter (optional)

Ground cinnamon to taste

Place the apple chunks in a heavy sauce pan and add apple cider to cover. Bring to a boil then cover and reduce heat to low and allow the sauce to simmer for twenty to thirty minutes until the apples soften. Mash the apples with a potato masher then add apple butter. Add ground cinnamon to taste finish the sauce.

This recipe will serve two when garnished with few sausage links, or four as a side to say breaded pork chops.

Potato pancakes have a lot going for them. They are delicious, economical, easy to make and versatile.

While traditionally topped with apple sauce or sour cream, I wouldn’t hesitate topping them with a robust goulash or chicken curry.

Now I shall return to a few brief thoughts on the enculturation power of the kitchen table.

The particulars of any ethnic heritage are not important. Broader cultural characteristics, such as table manners, the art of social conversation and communal behavior, are. A child raised in a household where potato pancakes are on menu can participate in cooking the say meal, by grating potatoes or mixing the ingredients, and take pride in his or her contribution to the meal. In the kitchen can learn the value and virtue of thrift. At the table the unwritten rules of manners and social grace are taught. It’s from the household and the kitchen table where the foundation is laid for the socially polished adult.

This isn’t trivial. This is where “the smell test” comes in.

One of my sons is a mid-management employee at a small business services company, in Milwaukee. He is involved in the process evaluating potential new hires. It’s his job to administer “the smell test.” He meets a job candidate for either breakfast or lunch and then gives the company president his general impression of the possible new hire.

His report on a gentleman under consideration for a senior position went something like this “manicured nails, a cheep suit…” The executive under consideration had lost his job in Chicago during the current recession.             

My son continued: “…wants a fat paycheck. Will bolt as soon as something comparable comes up in the Chicago area.”

The soft skills, social polish, confidence, and others are crucial to how well we navigate in life. These are the skills acquired in the household, the kitchen, and family meals around the kitchen table.

Artisan Pork and Beans

Why should anyone make baked beans when B&M and Bush’s make pretty good canned beans? Because they can be better made at home, though it takes awhile. At some point canned goods move from preserved foods to food products. Baked beans straddle the border.

Understand, canned goods are the product of an industrial/military complex of another time. Admittedly, the birth of canning is tied to an earlier global economy. The history of canning dates to the late 18^th century. Napoleon Bonaparte, desiring a reliable food supply for his empire building armies, offered a cash reward to anyone who could come up with reliable way to preserve food. It must have been a sizable one. Nicholas Appert subsequently spent 15 years experimenting with ways of preserving food in bottles, like wine. Byron Dorkin and John Hall took the process one step further by devising a method to seal food in unbreakable tin containers. They established the first commercial canning plant in England in 1813.

While born from an imperial global economy, canning was wonderfully suited to the home economy. In its transition from the early industrial economy to the home economy, craft was added to the process.

Home canning is a craft that I would like to explore. Rita won’t let me. She does not want to put up with case upon case of Ball jars, boxes of lids and a pressure cooker. It was hard enough to get her blessing for my interest in making hard cider. So I am content with canned goods from my grocer. Those are mostly limited to chicken and beef stock, diced tomatoes and tomato paste, pickles, beans and canned fruits and vegetables.

Here is where the artisan pork and beans come in. My home made beans are magnificent.

Rita and I went to a wedding in Boston. I hadn't been to New England before, so we rented a car and toured the Main Coast and New Hampshire's White Mountains. The primary objectives of this road trip were to find Charlie Bracket, to see an authentic Maine fishing village, and to find a good New England cookbook.

We found Charlie Bracket. He was delighted.

We eat lunch at a local water front restaurant/marina located in fishing cove north of Portland.

We didn't find a cookbook on our journey up the coast. It wasn't for a lack of vigilance. It was odd because we certainly visited enough touristy places where you would expect to find such a thing: Cape Ann, Salem, Lands End and more.

But all was not lost. While waiting for the plane home in Boston airport, I came across a New England cookbook in the airport's small bookstore. "The Book of New England Cookery," by Judith and Evan Jones.

In checking out The New New England cookbook I naturally looked at the chowder recipes. They looked good. But, the baked beans were what really sold me.

The instructions read in part:

"Dig a hole about 6 inches deeper and wider than the bean pot, and line it with small stones embedded in the earth. Build a fire of hardwood in the hole, and let it burn for about two hours. Use a shovel to remove the fire, but leave a layer of hot coals on the bottom. Put the bean filled pot in the hole, cover with the remaining hot coals, then top with a layer of earth about 4 to 6 inches thick. Leave the hole and its contents for about 6 hours, or, better yet, overnight."

Man, you've got to love a recipe for lowly baked beans that has you digging holes in your lawn. Here's the possibility of transforming the predictable, hum drum Memorial Day cookout into serious fun.

The key to the recipe, however, isn't the hole in the ground. It's maple syrup. Boston baked beans originated as a Native American dish. It called for navy beans, bear fat, and maple syrup. Navy beans are native to North America. The New England merchant seamen took them on their voyages, hence the term navy bean.

Not only did the New England settlers quickly buy into the native North American bean, they also bought into the native North American recipe for making them. But they substituted salt pork for bear. When trade with the West Indies brought molasses to New England, it was substituted for Maple syrup. The molasses was a much cheaper sweetener.

This recipe called for:

"1 pound of navy or pea beans

2 1/4-pound slices of salt pork

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup of molasses or 1/4 cup of molasses and 1/4 cup of maple syrup

Freshly ground pepper

Soak the beans overnight in water to cover. Put them in a large pot, bring to a boil, and cook until the skins burst when two or three are spooned out and blown upon. In a heavy pot with a tight fitting lid, put one thick piece of salt pork. Add cooked beans, the reserved liquid, salt molasses, and several turns of the pepper grinder. Put the remaining slice of salt pork on the top, skin side up. Cover the pot and put it in the hole you have prepared as follows..."

I followed this recipe with these exceptions.

I used 3/4 pound of salt pork cut into one inch cubes, and mixed the cubes with the beans. Salt pork comes in nominal 3/4 to one pound packages. What are you going to do with what ever is left?  And I baked them covered in a 275 degree oven for about five hours.

The result was out of this world. I had imagined the salt pork would remain as cubes of fat swimming in the beans like the pork in canned pork and beans. Instead the fat cooked off giving the beans a subtle meaty flavor and leaving little chunks of slow cooked pork in the stew. Those flavors with the hint of maple and slight bitter tinge from the molasses became married to the texture of tender yet firm beans. Here, finally, was something far superior to what comes out of a can. I think an onion would add nicely to the mix.

Since then, I have added:

1 Tbs. mustard powder

1 Tbs. minced garlic

1 large onion cut into a bite sized dice and added during the last hour of baking

1 to 2 Tbs. tomato paste to thicken the sauce

There you have it, my artisan pork and beans. I could easily cook up and jar 4 or 5 gallons of these beauties on a Sunday, then sell them the following Saturday at the farmers’ market. In doing so, I might also find myself in violation of a whole host of food regulations and in a big hurt, regardless of how fond my customers were of my artisan beans.

There you have it, a soft tyranny.

Regulating the Farmers' Market

As much as I can, I like to buy my food from farmers. I like farm markets, roadside stands and small town meat lockers. I like good food from those who grow and raise it. It's all under assault. This link is about one sort of assault on the family farm First Health Care Next the Food. It seems to have been a big news day. Here is another more graphic assault on the family farm and "community supported agriculture," Raw Food Market Raid.

There are politics here. With me, I once thought I was conservative. Then I thought I was liberal in the 18th and 19th century use of the word. Now, I am mostly libertarian. But all is subject to change. The one thing I do know, it's pretty hard to market homemade, artisan pork and beans.

Wendell Berry: A Second Helping

I really didn’t want to serve up a large second helping of Wendell Berry. Eugene Kane made me do it.

Kane is feature columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. He is a black editorialist who writes on news and policy from an “African-American” perspective. In a pair of columns last week, he connected the dots between household, education and the cycle of poverty.

On November 11, he wrote about a hot new movie called “For Colored Girls.” It’s based on a 1975 play called “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”

It’s a movie he didn’t want to see.

He wrote:

“I understand many black women feel to many black men have let then down and aren’t worth being in their lives…

It all makes for good drama.

But there were news reports last week on the statistics showing that 72% of African-American children are born to unwed mothers…

It’s hard to imagine how any community with major problems involving education, crime and poverty can improve without stronger relationships between men and women, which in turn lead to stronger families and more stable households.”

Last winter, I wrote the following in the beef soup chapter of the cookbook I’ve been working on. I cite my sources. Kane does not.

“I return to statistics to draw the picture. These ones are from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In 1980, 18.4% of children were born to unmarried women in the U.S. By 2005 that number had doubled to 36.9%. Among African-American women the nationwide number was 69.9% in 2005. In Wisconsin it was 82.2% in 2007.

While these numbers do not mean a single woman cannot provide a proper household in which to raise a child, they certainly show an increasing decline of traditional households. And there is fall out from it. In 2007 over 8,000 Wisconsin children were placed into foster homes.

The children entering foster care are disproportionately are African-Americans. Psychologist Lori Pyter cited these statistics, from the Center for the Study of Social Policy, in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel column: in 2000 African-American children represented 8.4% of all Wisconsin children and comprised 46.1% of Wisconsin children in foster care.

Pyter called this an “issue of proportionality” which both federal and state child welfare officials were beginning to recognize and address.

The reasons for placement were: neglect in almost 40% of all 2007 cases; parental drug abuse in over 16%; physical abuse in almost 14%; and “caretaker” incarceration in over 10%. (“Caretaker” like “issue of proportionality” are bureaucratic terms and are not mine. They are one more indication of the degree to which the industrial economy dominates our perception and thinking.)

While poverty is commonly considered the ultimate cause behind these statistics, none of the above directly relate to a lack of material resources needed to raise a child. The direct material conditions of poverty only enter the picture with the next leading cause of placement -- inadequate housing in 7.10% of the cases. In 80% of the cases, the cause wasn’t poverty per se, but directly related to “households” that were in one way or another broken.

Two Milwaukee children were recently placed under the formal foster care to their aunt. Both were subsequently physically abused. One of them, a toddler, died from the abuse. A publicly funded private non-profit agency, La Causa, was in charge of providing social services and welfare supervision.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial on the tragedy read:

“La Causa’s announcement Thursday that it no longer would be a contractor with the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare to place children in foster care should not keep the state from pursuing reforms it advocated after the death of 13-month-old Christopher L. Thomas Jr.

La Causa President and CEO Hugo Cardona said his agency his agency will terminate its $11 Million child welfare contract with the bureau because foster care no longer fits its mission.

We agree. State officials cited mistakes by La Causa in the boy’s death and in the beating of his 2-year-old sister, allegedly by an abusive aunt. They said La Causa failed to give the caseworker assigned to the Thomas case adequate training and supervision.

The La Causa supervisor in that case is also linked to the Arkisha Johnson case, in which the unstable woman drowned her 5-month-old son after a La Cuasa caseworker left her alone with the child. Johnson was not supposed to be left alone with her baby unless she was taking her medication.

Even with La Causa out of the picture, the state must continue to institute the changes it has promised, including more frequent home visits. Breakdowns in the system, like those in the Thomas and Johnson cases, can be fixed only with better oversight.” 

The care of children should rightly fall to the economy of household supported by community, or more explicitly – family, extended family, friends, neighbors and church.The state's role should be limited to terminating parental rights, when the community deems it necessary, and placing the child into an adoptive home. That role is solely a legal one.

Instead, the economy of caring for children is becoming an industrial economy defined by a progression of “caretaker,” caseworker, social service agency, a municipal or county Bureau of Child Welfare, a state Department of Children and Families and finally the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

It is a system, an economy, that my newspaper says can be fixed with better oversight. It seems to me it is an economy of nothing but oversight yet largely blind to the care of the individual children. The scale is all wrong. Wendell Berry is right. The “vast centralizing” industrial economy cannot fill the void left by a shattered household and community economy.

Foster care is only part of the picture. In Milwaukee County another 14,000 odd families receive state funded child care assistance. Overall in Wisconsin over 60,000 children were in the subsidized child care programs.

Berry’s view is toward agrarian communities. Mine is on the urban. His conclusions that when the industrial economy runs rampage, ultimately “the country itself is destroyed” applies to both.  

The damage done to our large urban centers, tragically, is nearly complete.

The comparison in unwedded birth rates, foster care placement and high school graduation rates between black and white Wisconsinites has nothing to do with race. Our urban black families, already wounded by the combined legacies slavery and racism, found themselves literally located in center of the industrial assault on household with public social services set up to mend the damage. The assault, like a military siege, economically isolated our urban neighborhoods. The social services are an industry unto themselves that misguidedly unbound the ties of family, household and community.

The end results too often are deadly.

I wrote an editorial for the Journal-Sentinel on Milwaukee’s homicide rate a few years ago. In 2002, the most recent statistics available at the time, Wisconsin’s homicide rate by firearms was 40 times grater among black males than for white males. It was 48.2 and 1.2 per 100,000 individuals respectively. Over the 10 or 15 year period when African-American men are most at risk, the individual odds of being murdered are somewhere between 150 and 200 to one. Growing from adolescence and through young adulthood is risky business for Milwaukee’s black males.

I looked at those fatality rates thinking of a public health issue. After all, if one out 200 young men in my community died of similar type of cancer over a 15 year period. It would be a cluster, the source of which would diligently ferreted out. Law suits would follow. 

I got it wrong. I wasn’t writing about public health I was writing on the “issue of proportionality.” I didn’t know that at the time. 

There is one more “issue of proportionality” to consider before returning to the passage from Berry’s essay Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.

In 2006, according to Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, overall 11 percent of pregnant women terminated their pregnancies. In Milwaukee County with the state’s largest concentration of African-Americans, that rate was nearly double at just over 20 percent from 2001 to 2005.

While a number of factors enter into the disproportion, nationwide African-American women account for 36 percent of all abortions, yet comprise only 13 percent of the population. According to the Guttmacher Institute, again nation wide, overall one out every five white pregnancies ends in abortion. Among African-American women that ratio is nearly one out of two.

The issue here isn’t about race. Sadly, African-Americans, whose roots go to the gross injustice of an earlier vast centralizing economy of plantation agriculture and slavery, now confront the heaviest fallout from the industrial economy. It’s about the harm the industrial economy has wrecked on community and household. For all of us, above all, it is about the harm wrecked on sexual love which is the glue that holds both together.

Now back to Berry’s essay.

“…but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.”

Among the consumer products the modern industrial economy has given us are a full array of contraceptive products. It is an economy that in trying to control fertility is in fact at war with fertility and ultimately at war with life itself. This is as true in agriculture as it is in family planning. It delivers an abundance of cheap food while degrading the natural environment upon which agriculture ultimately depends. It delivers sexual liberation while degrading the deep social bonds and the profound intimacy of sexual love.

Later in the essay Barry observes:

“Because of our determination to separate sex from the practice of love in marriage and in family and community life, our public sexual morality is confused, sentimental, bitter, complexly destructive, and hypocritical. It begins with the idea of “sexual liberation”: whatever people desire is “natural” and all right, men and women are not different but merely equal, and all desires are equal. If a man wants to sit down while a pregnant woman is standing or walk through a heavy door and let it slam in a woman’s face, that is all right. Divorce on an epidemic scale is all right; child abandonment by one parent or another is all right; it is regrettable but still pretty much all right if a divorced parent neglects or refuses to pay child support; promiscuity is all right; adultery is all right. Promiscuity among teenagers is pretty much all right, for “that’s the way it is”; abortion as birth control is all right; the prostitution of sex in advertisements and public entertainment is all right. But then, far down this road of freedom, we decide that a few lines ought to be drawn. Child molestation, we wish to say, is not all right, nor is sexual violence, nor is sexual harassment, nor is pregnancy among unmarried teenagers. We are also against venereal diseases, the diseases of promiscuity, though we tend to think that they are the government’s responsibility, not ours.

In this cult of liberated sexuality, “free” of courtesy, ceremony, responsibility, and restraint, dependent on litigation and expert advice, there is much that is human, sad to say, but there is no sense or sanity…”  

This liberated sexuality is free of the bonds of sexual love that bind a couple, a family, a household and the community.

So there it is. Our vast centralizing industrial economy has dehumanized sex by turning it into a commercial industry, has set in motion an ever increasing assault on family life and household, and in doing so has wrecked the social and economic foundation of genuine community, has waged war upon fertility, has both assaulted our natural environment and alienated us form it, and finally, allowed us to impose a new order of slavery on others.

Today, Eugene Kane nearly completed the circle. He wrote about how poorly African-American boys struggle in school.

"That's right: No matter how you slice it, among just about all students of similar ages, black boys end up on the bottom of the pile...

Sometimes, the only answer why so many black boys don't do well at school ins't about poverty or bad teachers but lies in the way they are raised and the households where they grow up..."

Another Thick Slice of Wendell Berry

This is tough stuff. It’s a thick slice of Wendell Berry, a heavy dose of the reality he writes about and I thought to include a slice of F.A. Hayek. On whole it would be a meaty sandwich, though tough and, might I say, somewhat unsavory. And for a blog, it would be quite indigestible. For now I’ll leave Hayek out of it, and simply serve my slice of Berry open-faced.

   

From his essay Conservation and Local Economy, he draws this conclusion: “”The business of America is business,” a prophet of our era too correctly said. Two corollaries are clearly implied: that the business of the American government is to serve, protect and defend business; and the business of the American people is to serve the government, which means to serve business. The costs of this state of things are incalculable. To start with, people in great numbers – because of their perception that the government serves not the country or the people but the corporate economy – do not vote…

…then two further catastrophes inevitably result. First, the people are increasingly estranged from the native wealth, health, knowledge, and pleasure of their country. And, second, the country itself is destroyed.”  

                                                                                                          

Taken to its limits, Berry sees the industrial economy as necessarily environmentally destructive, enslaving and dehumanizing. In Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community he observes:

“The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community reveals how precious and necessary community is.  For when community fails, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature and the lives of wild creatures.  All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism, but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life...”

He looks at the industrial economy from the vantage point of the slow displacement of the rural economy of diversified family farms and small towns serving those farms by industrial agriculture. It’s an economy that’s been displaced by well meaning national agricultural programs meant to ensure food surpluses though federal price supports. Those subsidies, over time have feed an industrial agricultural economy that has led to the slow decline of family farms and the rural small towns. All unintended.

Wendell Berry’ viewpoint is agrarian. And in terms of environmental degradation it is necessarily so.

But his economic hierarchy, founded on the economy of households and local community from which follow in descending order region, state, national, and global economies, applies to an urban industrial/post industrial setting. The lesson here is that much of our well intentioned public policy ultimately undermines the economies of households and local community and sets the stage for disaster.

Primary public education is a case in point. One of the primary functions of the household is the education of our children. In our huge urban schools districts it’s a disaster. The scale of economies is all wrong.

In January 2009 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that while the Milwaukee Public Schools’ high school graduation rate increased from 51.8% in 2000 to 68.6% in 2007, the overall student proficiency remained flat-lined with roughly 40% of 10^th graders proficient or advanced in reading and only 28% in math.

School districts measure their success by high school graduation rates and the average college admission test scores of those students taking that test. Wisconsin’s overall high school graduation rate was 89.6% in 2007. That year 70% of Wisconsin high school students eligible to take the ACT college admission test did so with and average score of 22.3, up from 22.2 in 2006.

So there you go. In Wisconsin, over 10% of high school students drop out and another 30% do not take the test for continued technical or college education. It seems 40% of the kids educated in our public schools are poorly served. Nevertheless, these ACT test numbers were proudly announced by the Wisconsin Department of Public education as a huge success, in an August 15 press release that year. This was the number second highest state average, tied with Iowa behind Minnesota.

Those happy numbers mask a more dismal truth. In 2006, the Wisconsin Technology Network pointed out that only 28% of the kids who took the college admission test that year were ready for college in all four core subject areas; English, reading, math and science. Nationwide, the Internet based Education Portal, reports that only 15% of the high school students who completed the core math courses were considered college ready.

Our “vast centralizing” education economy settles for the lowest common denominator -- mediocrity. Nationwide, fewer that 50% of fourth graders are able to read at grade level. Kids going on to college in increasing numbers need remedial instruction in math and composition. Their dismal knowledge of history, literature, math and general science is the norm and not the exception.

What we have missed is the economy of household and local community. Primary education should first be the responsibility of the household and by extension the immediate community. Outside of parents who are able to choose home schooling, or a private school, the education of our children is delegated to bureaucracies and self interests. 

In charge of our children’s primary education are “local” school districts, state departments of education, schools’ of education, unions, and a cabinet level federal Department of Education. In my area, the k12 cost per student is between $12,000 and$14,000 a year. And when none of that works we get a No Child Left Behind Act. Dismal.

The reason the oxtails are tough and tasteless is the same reason why “Johnny can’t read.” Both have been turned over to “vast centralizing” economies, that are not and can never be up to the job. 

In education, the primary problem isn’t failed Federal policy, or state policy, or education theory, though all contribute. Rather, it stems from economic violations of hierarchy and scale. The household should direct of the education its children. It is best able to identify and meet the individual needs of its children. Yet, the household has both voluntarily surrendered and been coercively stripped of this primary responsibility.

We have bought into the false promise of a centralizing economy and in the process, not only has the education of our children suffered, the very fabric of household has been weakened. The problem isn’t with schools per say. With increasing magnitude, it’s with school districts, unified school districts, huge centralized school districts, state departments of education, and finally lording over all a Federal Department of Education. Each bureaucratic layer further separates the child’s education from parental oversight and the parents’ desires for their children.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides similar bureaucratic oversight to the production and distribution of ox tails. The regulatory oversight places compliance costs that are unbearable for small meat processors to market locally produced beef and pork beyond their premises, while federal agricultural policies are steeply tilted toward confined animal feeding operations and ever cast a growing shadow of the industrial over that which should be agarain. In the process it serves us tough, second rate oxtails. And so it goes with household and community. 

A Simple Lamb Stew

I had thought to serve up another slice of Wendell Berry, a thick one supported with statistics on education, households and such. It is written and out of a larger context it’s disheartening. Instead, I’m turning to a happy topic, a simple lamb and mushroom stew served over oven browned potatoes. For two you will need:

2 lamb shoulder or round chops;

2 large or 3 medium baking potatoes;

½ pound of portabella mushroom caps;

1 tablespoon of lard* or olive oil;

2 tablespoons of butter;

Cornstarch;

¾ of a cup each of chicken and beef broth;

1 heaping teaspoon of minced garlic; and of course salt and pepper to taste.

*(Note: Lard is a marvelous fat for browning pork, beef and lamb. It can be heated to a much higher temperature than vegetable oils and therefore is a good fat for searing meats. Tallow does the same, but is not sold in stores. Both reinforce the meaty flavor of meat seared in them.)

To start: peal the potatoes and depending upon the size, cut each into four or six pieces. While doing that melt the two tablespoons of butter. Place the potatoes in a baking pan and coat with the butter, then season with salt and pepper and preheat the over to 400^o. 

Trim the lamb from the bone, trim excess fat and cut into stew sized pieces. Brown the lamb and bones in lard at medium high/high in lard until nicely browned. Drain the excess fat and deglaze the pan with a little water. Add the garlic, the mushrooms, chicken and beef stock. When it comes to a boil reduce the heat to medium/medium low and cover. Put the potatoes in the oven.

In the kitchen, timing is everything. The slowly braising lamb and the caramelized oven roasted potatoes should both be done in about an hour. Stir the lamb every fifteen or twenty minutes (add liquid as needed and always taste as you go). Turn the potatoes after around thirty-five minutes. While everything cooks, enjoy a cook’s glass of wine and pleasant conversation with whoever will be gathered at your table.

To finish: dissolve two heaping tablespoons of corn starch into one ½ cup of water and slowly add it to the stew to thicken it. Adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and garlic. Serve over the oven browned potatoes with a side vegetable or a salad.

I offer this recipe with the understanding that lamb is off the menu for the majority of Americans who somehow find its flavor objectionable. That’s too bad. It’s a beautiful meat that lends to grilling, roasts and stews and holds its own to a variety of complementary flavors. In this recipe it’s simply mushroom and garlic. But other recipes can include tarragon, mint, curry, or fennel. And that’s just the beginning.

You certainly won’t find lamb on the menu in a nationally franchised restaurant. Yet, you might find it served up in cozy neighborhood restaurant or in a fancy downtown destination place. In the later, my simple stew might be described as “braised lamb and mushrooms served over a bed of caramelized root vegetables.” There, the vegetable mix might include parsnips, carrots, rutabaga and onions with the potatoes. It would carry a fancy price. My guess would be somewhere between $22 and $28, maybe more. Cooked at home the cost is less than $3 a plate. But that’s beside the point.

What we are willing to pay something depends somewhat on its quality, but more upon the honor we ascribe to the person producing it. The head chef in the fancy restaurant is held in high esteem, the manager at franchised fast food outlet less so.

In this regard the globalized industrial economy is horribly dehumanizing. We sacrifice quality at the altar of price—think of the feedlot here or the poorly made imported shoes. In doing so, to varying degrees, we sacrifice the fundamental dignity of work and our gratitude to those who serve our needs.