Otto von Bismarck once famously compared legislation to sausage-making: either one was better left unseen. As even seemingly minor political questions in the United States become more and more contentious, Bismarck’s advice seems sage—at least when it comes to politics. What about sausage? Having never made sausage before, I couldn’t have told you. But I did spend my undergraduate career studying politics; if Bismarck’s comparison was apt then surely my knowledge of politics would make for easy sausage-making. As it turns out, the processes are remarkably similar.

Step 1: Ignore all the Experts

The world is filled with people who devote their lives to studying complex problems for no other reason than a desire to solve them. As a lawmaker, it’s absolutely paramount to ignore these people—after all, God chose you for office, not them. It goes the same with sausage; there are cookbooks in the local bookstore and library filled with sausage recipes: there are probably even some on my own bookshelf. The Internet gives me access to thousands of sausage recipes developed by competent cooks with years of experience making sausage. But what do they know? I went rogue and left the cookbooks on the shelves.

Step 2: Misunderstand the Situation

The background for this sausage-making session is this: last winter, my friend Shawn decided to become a vegetarian. Consequently, his freezer full of game—provided by his avid hunter stepfather—was of no use to him. And so one cold winter in the parking lot of Stub & Herb’s, Shawn provided us with a foam cooler full of mostly unlabeled frozen bags that he identified as duck, venison and goose—unfortunately I neglected to carefully remember which was which.

After the better part of a year dipping into this bounty for feasts of wild game, I was down to one large bag of unidentified meat. Pulling it out of the freezer I was pretty sure I remembered that this bag contained goose, but as days of gradual thawing in the refrigerator passed I became less confident. When sausage day came I had to rely on the same thing so many of our elected officials use every day: research? Hah, who has the time? I went with my gut. Looking at the deep red color, I took a deep whiff of the meat and decided with confidence that this was, without a doubt, venison.

Two weeks later I can say with equal confidence that the meat was definitely goose.

Step 3: Break it into Manageable Parts

The issues brought before our congresses are often hopelessly immense, affecting great segments of society. Faced with such a situation, many of us would be paralyzed: how can we change things when so many people will be hurt, even if many more benefit? But rather than freeze in the face of the immensity of their task, our august leaders know the best way to tackle a complex issue is to break it into smaller, easier-to-understand titles, sections, subtitles, subsections, addenda, clauses and footnotes. Or, when making sausage, cut the meat into manageable 1″ chunks. Putting them in the freezer for thirty minutes helps firm them.

Step 4: Add a lot of Extra Stuff

One and a half pounds of half-frozen chunks of mystery meat hardly sounds appetizing, nor are, in most cases, bills brought before Congress in their original form particularly palatable. Luckily, it’s easy to add in enough enticements to make even the worst stinker of a bill passable, or the lowest grade of soon-to-rot meat into a delicious hot dog. Passing a bill to cut Medicare benefits? Throw in a rider to insure children—everybody loves kids! Funding the military? Might as well build an ethanol plant back home; it’s a lot of money either way. Sausage-making is a little more constrained here since the adjuncts have to somehow go with the meat you are using, rather than just tossing in any old thing. For my goose (that I thought was venison) I added 44 grams of garlic and onion, 8 grams of black pepper, 3 grams of juniper berries and 15 grams of salt (NB: this sausage was over-seasoned, in the future I’ll cut some of the pepper and juniper).

Incidentally if I had added some pork it not only would have improved the sausage it would also have made the metaphor behind the post all the more fitting.

Step 5:  Mangle it Beyond Recognition

With the ingredients assembled, all that remains is to introduce your bill to the various committees, subcommittees, sub-subcommittees, caucuses, interest groups and lobbyists who will happily amend, rewrite and otherwise modify it. The process in sausage-making is much simpler—toss everything in a meat grinder running at full tilt—but achieves the same result.

This was certainly the step that Bismarck had in mind when he warned against observing these processes; in either case it ain’t pretty.

Step 6: Package It

All that grinding and chopping is sure to leave you with a mess and more than a little blood on your hands. The same is true in sausage-making. Few would be excited to eat the loose-meat slop that exits the grinder—what’s needed is a little salesmanship. Enter the sausage-casing: a way to take all those sundry bits and package them into an appealing cylinder that will plump as it cooks. Although it is important when filling sausage casing to leave enough space to be able to twist off the links, when attempting to pass legislation it is most important that the text be printed on as few pages as possible, lest your opponents gain a valuable prop.

Step 7: Ram it Down their Throats

The sausages are stuffed, the pages are all written and the votes taken, the only thing that remains is to foist your work on an unsuspecting public or, to borrow a phrase from some of our more enlightened contemporary political philosophers, to “ram it down their throats.” Of course, if you’ve done a good job obscuring the whole sausage-making process from your diners’ eyes, this will be less necessary as they’ll be allured by the aromas and ignorant of all the necessary gore. This is easy enough to achieve in a home kitchen—just have your guests arrive well after the meat grinder is cleaned up and put away.

As much as I love to cook, I am really not a fan of kitchen gadgets. This is partially out of necessity; our very small kitchen doesn’t have room to store every species of specialized tool for making every conceivable cooking task a breeze. I also have a deep aversion to spending money, so when I walk into the local kitchen store whatever desire I feel is quickly snuffed out by a look at the prices. All that said, I can’t pass up a deal, so when Martha came home from some thrift-shopping with news of old-fashioned, hand-cranked meat grinders for the ridiculous price of $2.00, I made a quick decision: it was time to start grinding my own meat.

“But Tom,” you say, “it’s the twenty-first century. You don’t have to grind your own meat anymore! You can buy it ground in nice little packages from your local grocery. You can even get it pre-pattied for all your hamburger needs!” True, but then how would I get two dollars worth out of this grinder? Besides, there are some real advantages to grinding meat at home. If you’re worried about E. Coli,  grinding in small batches means less chance of mixing in contaminated meat (this always remains a possibility, of course). More importantly for me, by grinding at home I can control what beef gets ground. Specifically, I can grind in a high percentage of beefy, marbled short-ribs. Given the variety of beef cuts available, a grinder can take you way beyond the grocery store options of chuck or sirloin.

Although the pitted cast iron surfaces, wooden handle, and the fact that it was a consumer product made in the USA all suggested to me that my thrift store grinder was quite old, it appears that it was actually in production recently enough to be sold new over the Internet. My particular model was either old and neglected or just neglected enough to require vigorous a scrubbing down.

With a mind to that scrubbing, I fired up the Google to learn about meat grinder care and was surprised and a little disappointed that my meat grinder was actually a Food Chopper — a kind of proto-food processor. The difference seems to be that while meat grinder usually extrude the grind through perforated disks, the Universal Model 2 Food Grinder passes the food through a kind of toothed wheel that screws on to the end of the unit. Different tooth sizes and spacings are used to produce different sized chops. But you can in fact grind meat with a food processor (chill cubes in freezer 30 minutes then pulse), so it stands to reason that its predecessor would work well enough. I set about cleaning it anyway.

With all the parts cleaned and dried, I was excited to cube my beef and get to the business of grinding. For simplicity’s sake I planned to make hamburgers using a beef blend that has worked in the past: about 70% beef short ribs and 30% chuck. For the beef to be caught by the augur of the Universal Model 2, I cut it into 1″ chunks.

The grinding process went very smoothly; I was able to process the 1.5# of beef in under 5 minutes. I did notice two apparent flaws in the design: 1.) the cutting wheel is positioned too close over the base of the grinder, making it difficult to place any kind of tray in a spot where it will collect all of the ground meat and 2.) as I was grinding, I started to notice blood dripping onto the floor out of the place where the handle attached to the augur. Martha acted quickly, putting a plate down to protect our floor, but it seems to me that any blood that is squeezed out by the action of the grinder is blood that’s not going to be making your hamburgers juicy. Still, for a pound and a half of meat, I think we only lost a teaspoon of blood; hardly earth-shattering. This might be remedied in the future by remembering to chill the meat in the freezer before grinding to firm it up. The grind produced by the larger cutting wheel was suitable for hamburgers, though I might have liked it a bit coarser.

How were the burgers? They were good — how could anything involving that much short-rib go wrong? I was pleased not to notice any metallic taste from flaking off rust — we must have done a good enough job scrubbing. Ideally, I would like to do a blind taste-test involving store-ground beef, beef ground in a food processor and the Universal. I am also excited to use the grinder in other applications, especially revisiting my old friend the terrine. Now I just have to figure out where I’m going to put the thing.

Recently Big Pepper decided it could add value by attaching grinders to jars of whole peppercorns. I guess this is a good thing if it gets people to stop eating pre-ground pepper, but there is a big problem with these new jars for those of us who own (several) pepper grinders. For whatever reason, the grinders are not removable: you can’t get to the whole peppercorns inside the jar. They just sit there, mocking you. Until now.

For this hack, you’ll need a sharp knife and some pliers… use the knife to cut all the little plastic arms holding the central grinder piece in place and use the pliers to rip out the center, as violently as possible. I was so satisfied when I defeated this nefarious contraption that I immediately filled all our pepper grinders.

Just one small victory in the war against the pepper industry fat cats who think they know what’s best.