A Smoked Ham Shank in Sauerkraut

I saw a group of smoked ham shanks (these were from the pigs' shins in this case) sitting there at Wegman's a few weeks back while I was more or less suicidally depressed and having gut troubles -- which one was contributing to the other I still haven't fathomed out, but both have thankfully passed -- and began to get mildly interested. I figured: ham shanks, ham hocks, ox tails. You use them to make a good meaty-tasting soup or stew without paying a lot of money*. So I bought a pair, 2.87lb at $2.99/lb.

One I boiled away in a dutch oven with onions, some potatoes, and threw in cabbage wedges towards the end, similar to how I do a corned beef. Small meat returns, but nice.

Last night I took the other one intending to do a bean stew thing with cannelini beans, and later checked in with The Joy of Cooking and found their recipe for Ham Hocks with Sauerkraut calling for smoked hocks and got to thinking. I had a quart of self-fermented sauerkraut in the fridge. The recipe calls for celery seeds and the kraut is full of them plus garlic and parsnips. Also the recipe's first line is:

"A tasty dish rather heavy in fat."

All doubts dispelled. I reduced the recipe, and started sauteeing (rather than boiling) half an onion in a 3qt pot -- IN DUCK FAT! Yes. I didn't see much fat on these shanks. I added about four garlic cloves towards the end of the onion browning, and started trying to sear the shank sort of. Before it all burned up I added cold water to about 3/4 cover the shank, and then stirred and let it on a highish simmer, turning every so often for about 2 hours with the lid on. In the last half hour I added about 2 cups of drained awesome sauerkraut and a few random Dutch yellow potatoes and let it simmer/boil for a while.

Nice peasant food for a cold night.
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*Though ox tail is stupidly expensive in the US. For something that is constantly covered in shit, it should be far cheaper.

Beer That Couldn't Even Hurt A Fly

I went to Otto's brewpub last week for a drink with a friend, and got the kind of slap in the face that is so typical of eating or drinking out in State College. You try to give things a chance here rather than to become preemptively embittered, and then you get hit with the mediocre. (Full disclosure: I am writing this after a mild food poisoning episode from eating an ill-advised "Gator and Pork Burger" at Rathskeller -- I was trying to give it a chance.)

They had a Green Hop Ale #1 on cask-pull, so my friend and I decided to try that out. Possibly interesting. But it sucked. Had almost no hops at all. Presumably they ONLY used green hops and no dried hops, and as Joy Of Cooking will tell you, dried herbs are 4-5 times stronger than fresh by volume. Anyway, it was bland beer, indistinct, not much fun to drink. Should have been dumped down the drain, all 1000 gallons of it. I ordered a Slab Cabin IPA to wash it away, which is reliably good. When my friend went back to the last 1/3 of her beer, she found a little fly in it and just gave up. The penultimate insult.

I mean penultimate in its real sense. As we got up to leave 10 minutes later, the FINAL insult was revealed:

While we were talking, the fly managed to crawl all the way back up to the rim of the pint glass, apparently unscathed by hops, alcohol content, bad vibes, or anything else, and like us was also getting ready to go somewhere else.

Whack.

The JoC and an Unnecessary Marxist/Realist interlude

Looking for the way to reseason a cast-iron implement in my 1974 Joy of Cooking, I read these passages on page 163, where Rombauer and Becker acquire that almost mystical tone that makes their book timeless (though by using "she" throughout they do ground it in a particular time):

There is a certain pace in food preparation that an experienced cook learns to accept. This doesn't mean she scorns short cuts, but she comes to know when she has to take the long way 'round to get proper results. She senses not only the demands of her equipment but the reactions of her ingredients.

In much of the JoC it's easy to get the feeling that you're just being talked at as someone whose main concern is home economics. That is, literally, your main job is to figure out how to stretch the household's dollar as you feed it using money that you had no part in acquiring (i.e., 'He' earned it by using his body to convert labor into capital at the service of The Man). It therefore quietly reinforces the woman's role in the classic (now mostly altered for the intended audience) nuclear family unit of production in a capitalist system where the basic unit of economic production is that heterosexual nuclear family unit, where the primary goals of the unit are to reproduce itself biologically by having more kids to form more similar units, and to reproduce the ideologies of the roles of everyone in that family unit. Paraphrasing Althusser (1927): as every child knows, the ideological apparatus has not only to reproduce itself, but also the conditions of that reproduction. If not, then folks say "Fuck this, I'm not teaching my kids to reproduce our shitty family life because it enslaved me and I don't want my children enslaved" and before you know it, the state and ideological apparatuses collapse, leaving us all in (at least we are told so) an unintelligible social reality of pervasive horror and nausea ... at best!

Well, okay, maybe that's one function the JoC can and does serve: domesticating the domestic human. But when I read passages like those above and identify with "The Cook" subject regardless of the "she" (which I do), or when I go back for the one millionth time to check on what they say is the difference between a soft- and hard-boiled egg, I get something else. Despite the major theme of home-economy and the functional role of She in the biological necessity of familial subsistence, there are these other notes throughout that specifically identify that the Means of Production, at the most basic level -- i.e., physiologically maintaining and reproducing the family labor unit, day after day -- are not substantially alienated from She (or me, or us). To me the above passage is not just some mystifying rhetoric about what She knows intrinsically as a woman, aka, over-determined biological reproductive unit situated in a society. All people that love cooking know the truth of that statement. That's a reality of cooking. Just to be glib and Hegelian, let's say the cook is in a constant dialectical relationship with the demands of its equipment and the reactions of the ingredients. I see there is some room here, by defining a dialectic without reference to the other forces of the present economic system that is true anywhere at any time, always and already over-determined by the nature of food: physically, chemically, culturally. This dynamic the cook participates in has been (is being) reproduced in some or many forms since humans started to alter raw foods, along with the reproduction of the classic family group -- not always with it -- and one does not inevitably reproduce alongside the other.

Which is why though I'm mostly a boy I cook, and I don't only cook boiled Irish meats and vegetables like that She known as my mom.