R-E-S-P-E-C-T

November 13, 2016.

 In the words of the old hymn:

"Come, ye thankful people, come,

Raise the song of harvest home.

All is safely gathered in

E'er the winter storms begin."

Used to be, we were disappointed, but not surprised, when the men of the family would get up after Thanksgiving dinner and head out the door from Grandma and Grandpa Hurst's house to pick a few acres before evening.  A couple of years, due to drought, or government programs, or both, we actually finished harvest by Halloween.  That was bad.  But more recently in terms of Hurst Farms lore, we fervently hope to bring in the last wagon load of corn...or, in wet years, soybeans, by mid November...because that is Charlie's birthday, giving us twice the license to celebrate.

It wasn't always that way. When Charlie was a boy, the crops were planted much later so the last pass with the plow would catch the late germinating weeds.  Without grain dryers or bin fans, the crop had to do all its drying in the field, so harvest lasted well into December. I reckon he got a cake (Grandma was a great cook!) but otherwise November 15 was just another day of work on the farm....

 Before we were out of college and back on the farm, Blake and I stayed with his folks on weekends.  As a rookie at the farm wife business, I wanted to make a good impression on my in-laws and did the only thing I knew how to do: I got up as early as I heard Millie stirring in the kitchen.  The kitchen was warm, busy, and smelled of coffee.  The table was the nerve center of the family and farm, a place where plans were made, stories were told, and sports were analyzed and deconstructed, years before that word was a part of the vocabulary.

Time passes, but the kitchen table still serves the same function for the much larger family that drops in for coffee, Sudoku, and conversation.  

Sports, from elementary volleyball, through East Atchison junior high and high school, to the collegiate black and gold of Missouri, and culminating at the pinnacle of fan and family allegiance, the St. Louis Cardinals, is subjected to a gimlet eye and partisan 's critique of the referee's and/or coach's judgments.  If one has attended as many sporting events as Charlie and Millie have, on hard bleachers, in cold mist or pouring rain, rooting for winners...and losers....one has earned the right to an opinion!  

2016 Fair

1995 Fair, Ann's steer

2014 Fair, Aaron's pig

And then there are all the 4H and FFA projects.  How many steers and hogs, meek and mild or crazy and wild, underfed or overfed, winning or losing, has Grandpa Charlie put up his hand and bid for.  How many times has the auctioneer sidled over to the fence and crooked his finger for one more bid while a granddaughter with a pie or cake stood in the ring?  So many county fairs...more seats in the bleachers....and more appreciation due than any thank you note can express.  

Chocolate cake 1990

Apple pie 1994

In 1978, Charlie helped these two rookie carpenters make a bare bones little tenant house with a toilet in one room, a shower stall in another, and no furnace at all, into our first home.  In 1986, he helped frame up, roof, sheet rock, and finish the addition doubling the size of our farmhouse so kid number three would have place to lay his head. Without his do-it-yourself ethos, I don't know that we would ever have attempted to build that addition, to take on even one greenhouse, much less the much larger projects that followed.  

1978

1986

16 By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Just so, every good tree bears good fruit,  (Matthew 7: 16-17)

I've got a whole album of photos to prove this verse true.  There's a black and white with Millie and Charlie, Grandma and Grandpa Hurst. 

 There's a wedding photo, circa 1977, of Blake, his folks and his brothers at Trinity Lutheran in Jefferson City.  Sorry about the tuxes, guys; it WAS the '70s.  

Here's Millie and Charlie one Christmas in their old house, sporting personalized red and white Tarkio Indian polo shirts, all the better to endure nights of basketball games in an overheated gym. 

Wedding receptions too numerous to count.

  Cardinal baseball in Redbird gear of many vintages, including the classic set with "Together 19"on one shirt and "Since 56" on the other. 

 We've gotten a lot of laughs from the guy in Chicago who couldn't recall a Cardinal player named "SINCE". Here's Charlie hobnobbing with the Canadian Consul, 

at the podium in the White House West Wing press room, 

querying pundit Michael Barone at a Farm Bureau Foundation banquet,

 laughing with the Vice President at the White House Christmas Party,

 thumbs up at Brooks' college graduation, 

with Alissa at her high school graduation,

 signing the papers at Ben's commissioning into the Army

 and dancing with Lee at her wedding.  

Finally, a hilarious, chaotic  sequence shot at the 60th Anniversary party this past June, with at least one kid crying, one kid dancing, and who knows how many heads turned and eyes closed . 

 By  "these fruits" you will know the "good tree" at the base of our family tree: by good example, frugality, hard work, sacrifice, perseverance, honesty, and dedication.  

We can't fix the Missouri Tigers.

We can't fire Joe Buck.

We can't advise Mike Matheny.

But we can sure wish you a Happy Birthday!

Grandpa and his birthday buddy, Josh

Together they are '88'!

From Scratch II

" I had a greengage tree, that's the best of all plants, espaliered on the wall outside my bedroom. And there is nothing that tastes better than a warm greengage plucked out of your bedroom window on a summer evening. And I did have the extraordinary good fortune to grow up eating what I think the romantic movement dreams of. We had milk fresh from the cow; I never had pasteurized milk until I went to school. We had fish from the river, pheasant from the farm. The food was extremely good. French friends used to come and stay for great long periods of time because they liked it so much. It wasn't fancy, but it was--we never had cans, we never had tins, we never had--everything was fresh from the garden. So, I do romanticize--some of that because the taste was often extraordinary. " Rachel Laudan, author of Cuisine and Empire, from the interview with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast: (Rachel Laudan on the History of Food)

"This book of recipes of wonderful things to eat suggests that we were all raised with a background and heritage of good food, and for the most part, this is true.  But the definition of luxury food has changed over the years.  What is now economy food was in some cases a luxury item 50 years ago. For example, chicken is now one of the cheapest meats, but several decades ago chicken was the choice for Sunday dinner or when there were guests.  Lucky indeed was the man who married a girl that could fry chicken since it was an inborn trait."
C. John Renken, Jr. , Introduction to The Renken's Recipes to Die For, Thanksgiving 1992

Nelson Ladies with Peach orchard

Millie: "Mom baked bread every Saturday; she made loaves enough to last all week.  She baked home made donuts with some of the dough. The older kids told us younger ones biting into a donut hole would kill us.  And when we left a chewed around hole behind, the older kids came after and ate them all.....   Mom baked biscuits from scratch every morning for breakfast...biscuits and gravy and fried leftover potatoes and fried beef.  We got a bucket of beef every week from the Farmers City beef club; it was always gone by Friday.  Mom had to get up early to get the fire going in the wood stove to cook breakfast."

Charlie :  "There was an upstairs room in the old house that we stored salted meat in.  When we tore the house down, it still smelled like Morton salt. We didn't eat much beef....mostly pork and chicken. "

Millie: "We only had iced tea...though it wasn't cold...when the haymen or threshers came to work and eat with us.  That's when we would eat "special food" like chicken..  First the men would eat, then the children, and the women would eat after everyone else was finished.  Everything was from scratch.  We ate roast, noodles, and a lot of hash...onions, beef, and leftover potatoes."

Millie: "My grandma kept butter and milk cold in her well. We had an icebox. Mom made cottage cheese every week, setting milk out in a crock on an enameled table in the kitchen.  We churned butter by hand and separated the cream. "

Charlie: "We had a water separator for cream; it was a 10 gallon column with a valve at the bottom and a sight gauge.  You'd pour the milk in the top and then pour in water.  The water made the cream separate faster.  You'd open the valve to let out the cream.  The chickens got the leftover milk and water.  It stood on a three legged stand."

Millie: "We'd shell peas til our fingers blistered."

Charlie: "Mom tried shelling peas onto a sheet by running them through the Maytag wringer washer...peas flew everywhere!"

Millie: " We 'd walk by Grandma's after church after she'd  baked bread.  If she was home we'd stay and visit.  If she wasn't, we ate all her food. We'd spread mustard on the homemade bread..."

Young Charlie Hurst

Charlie: "When I was six, we had three single men and the school teacher living upstairs and eating with us."

Millie:  "There were always nine people to feed."

"Raising five kids on a letter carrier's salary required holding the weekly grocery bill down but we certainly never went hungry.  However we did have some menus which represented a real challenge to a kid's palate.  Even now, I can feel the gorge rising at the thought of breaded beef brains or fried eggplant.  Often when something new was on the evening menu, Mom would take me aside before the meal and charge me with trying the new food and showing a favorable response to my younger brother and sisters. The responsibility was awesome; at the first bite, I could see their eyes scanning my throat muscles.....
.....Dad was also the recipient of occasional gifts of dressed coon from some of his patrons especially when he was carrying mail in the east side of town.  Mom would dutifully bake the coon.  I can't remember any negative reaction to it which means it must have been good.  Dad and I would also go down to Weir's creek below Lincoln University and seine for crawdads which were delicious.  We frequently received gifts of cooked cheese which was a special treat on homemade bread.  Momma Beck would buy it from out in the country.  I have never seen anything like it in the supermarkets or delicatessens.  I don't know its proper name; maybe it doesn't exist anymore except perhaps in rural Germany or Switzerland."  C. John Renken, Jr.

 Millie: "We ate A LOT of eggs."

Charlie: "You had to boil and boil to get rid of enough salt to make that pork edible."

 If we say that peasants in the past ate healthier and safer food, it's easy to translate that into the world of development and say, 'We really want people to stay in small farms on the land. We want women in South Africa to continue pounding their maize in a mortar with a great big pestle.' And to condemn them to the kind of poverty that our ancestors escaped, 3, 4, 5, 6 generations ago. I think we just simply have to give up the myth of a golden age in the past that is a template for the present.
Rachel Laudan

History professor Rachel Laudan wishes critics of today's food systems would  look back to the not so distant past and have a conversation or two with people who truly ate what they grew and lived on the food available seasonally.  Folks who were pork folks...or beef folks...and killed, not the fatted calf, but a squawking chicken, when company called.  The breakfast my husband's grandmother prepared for her large family every morning: from scratch biscuits and gravy, fried steak and potatoes, cornmeal mush, sounds like a feast. But it required her to rise early to revive the fire in the wood stove to bake and fry and boil the water she hauled from the well to clean up the dishes afterward.   Today's abundance of food is no mystery; it is the result of both the revolutionary increase in productivity on the farm and a concurrent transformation of processing, preserving and transportation, increasing not just the amount of food available, but giving consumers of all incomes an astronomical increase of choices and variety....

And then I tweak myself and I say, 'Look, Rachel, your mother spent all day, every day gardening or cooking.' Essentially. As well as doing other chores. And she said to you, 'Rachel, it's servitude. I want you to have a life I didn't have.' And here I am sitting in this very privileged position of having had a life as an academic, which has to be one of the happiest situations a human being can find themselves in, with time to think and money to live on and the chance to travel. Rachel Laudan

  Whenever we add up the pluses and minuses of a modern food system, we are less than honest if we do not include the freedom to do something else with one's time and talent besides make a meal.  Cooking can be art, created and composed with loving attention to the mingling of tastes and textures; we all remember and treasure meals like that.  But food is also fuel and sustenance; the world is a richer place if Mom throws a take and bake pizza in the oven before she goes to church for children's choir with one kid and Dad gets home from coaching Little League with the other....

We haven''t always had that choice....
 

Renken family circa mid 60s