How Walmart is turning me into a Vegetarian - or Why I miss Charlie Painter, Carl Price, and Ben.

I know I lament about cooking, but this recipe is a cinch and perfect to cook at my mom's: Swiss Steak a la Fannie Farmer, a recipe I've prepared successfully multiple times. To paraphase Ms. Farmer:

1. Buy rump, round, or chuck steak.
2. Beat with a meat hammer, er, meat tenderizer.
3. Brown.
4. Stick in oven for 2 hours with stewed tomatoes and onions. 

When Mom and I were at Ralph's I should have heeded the foreshadowing:  2 of our favorite waitresses  started a diatribe about how much they hated Walmart. I scoffed - the one in Roanoke Rapids is certainly better than the one in Durham......

Fast forwad to me at Walmart at the meat counter. Any beef other than hamburger appears to be in very short supply. Choices are slim, and I pick the only slab of beef that meets the critera for Swiss steak.

We bring it home, I beat the hell out of it with a mallet, brown it and pop it in the oven. 

So when I removed 2 hours later, my hopes for a melt in your mouth roast is dashed to bits when I realize that EVERY MOLECULE OF THE BEEF is HELD TOGETHER BY TWO MOLECULES OF GRISTLE. It was wretched - the fattiest, gristliest hunk of beef you can imagine. I didn't remember it going INTO the oven like that. I sawed and searched until I found a piece of barely edible beef about the size of a deck of cards and put on mom's plate - another even smaller one for me.

Mom ate hers. Well after all, she did live through the depression. I myself, a child of the sixties, raised in the day of "if it feels good, do it" decided it DID NOT feel good, so I WASN'T GOING TO EAT IT. I could hear a cow laughing somewhere in heaven.holding his sides and chortling "Disgusted another one!!" And disgusting it was. Gristle - the most hideous sounding word is indeed the perfect sounding word for the most wretched meat I have ever seen or tried to eat. Walmart should be ashamed of labeling  it for human consumption.

And is there a butcher to complain to? Was it cut in Roanoke Rapids or far far away? I suspect somewhere in the bowels (another apt word) there is a butcher in the back, but I don't think they come out very often, they only dash in and out when the produce guys give them the "all clear."

And that is why I miss Charlie Painter, Carl Price and Ben. When I was a kid Charlie Painter ran the absolute perfect version of the country store just a 1/2 a block away from my house with every conceivable item a small town family could want. (Most memorably cookies in large jars 2 for 5 cents handed out WITHOUT rubber gloves by whoever was working the register. )Mr. Charlie was a nice man and the town's pubescent boys would count on him for their first job bagging groceries.

When you entered the small, store (which was bursting with stuff) and headed straight back, you'd come to the meat section where Mr. Carl (who always called me "Meanness" )  and Mr. Ben always had fresh pork, beef, and chickens. And sausage - the BEST homespiced sausage you can imagine. Country hams wrapped in their sacks and hoops of sharp chedder cheese. We knew WHERE our meat came from, we accepted that these good men dealt with it properly, and we appreciated the good quality and care given to any meat bought on the premises and wrapped up in crisp white butcher paper.

Today that individual touch seems to have gone the way of hoop cheese and jars of cookies, pushed aside by the big boys of Walmart. There is one good way around it....

Just pass the vegetables, please!