Nostalgia and mechanical grinders

Every year NPR puts on Mama Stamburgs cranberry recipe.  It is very different.  This year the 8 year old granddaughter helped with the grinding.  They use an old fashioned hand grinder dated sometime prior to 1909.  They grind up a bag of cranberries, a small whole onion and drain off the juice.  This is set aside in a bowl and add two big tbsp. of FRESH horse radish, 8 ounces of sour cream,add a little sugar.  Mix well and store in freezer until needed for topping the turkey or addition to left over turkey, dinner roll and cranberry relish sammies.

My family recipe was a jello version and tasted MUCH different.  The original recipe calls for lemon jello.  That was discarded in favor of black cherry which makes a much richer combination.  Grind the berries, one whole orange, add one cup sugar, macerate one hour, prepare jello, use half the amount of water or juice called for it jells quicker and more solidly.Add chopped walnuts and chopped cerery, set and serve for dinner.  

Now, Virginia's version of the use of the meat grinder was a bit more involved.  We had to use a large bread board to anchor the grinder as the jaws were note wide enough to go around the edges of the counter.  So one lucky kid got elected to sit on the board AND. HOLD. IT. STILL.  God help any one who wiggled.  Also must place chair holding a drip bowl beneath the grinder as it leaked like a sieve.  And the juice got used religiously in the prep for the jello. After all of that proceed with rest of the recipe.

The only other occasion when the grinder appeared was one day I came home from highschool and there was something odd lying on a plate in the middle of the table. 

"Mom, what is that thing?"

" It's a cow's tongue."

Ugh, Dad had purchased a yearling calf at the auction, had it butchered and we were now blessed not only with 400 lbs of ground beef, roasts and steaks but the organ meat.  The meat was kept in a local locker as no one owned large home freezers then.

So Mom boiled up the tongue, peeled the thing and ground it up in the meat grinder.  She mixed in fine chopped onions, some salt and pepper and Mayo.  It made mighty fine sandwich spread.  I don't remember if I tortured my siblings with that item or not.  But I knew that artistically slices of tongue would go unconsumed. Bon appetite.