Girl on the Block Page 11
Every year I hear at least two of my coworkers swear that they’ll never do Christmas again, but when November rolls around, we’re all in the same place we were the year before. Perhaps we secretly enjoy the mad rush of providing people with their meals; after all, the hard labor of our farmers, our slaughterhouses, and our butchers is what put the food on their tables. In July, when the marketing department has already begun to talk about Christmas photo shoots and product choices, my heart always sinks. The thought of the time of year that should be joyous fills me with dread, yet I still go back for more. Post-Christmas, we’re back to work on the 28th enjoying two quiet days in the shop before things are back to normal as the new year approaches. Is anything worth the missed sleep, backaches, and sores on our feet that won’t heal for a good few months? Probably not. Will you see us again next year? Absolutely.
Primal Cuts
Breaking Down a Lamb
Breaking down a lamb was one of the most useful things I was ever taught. Lamb meat is expensive, and the bones are small, so it is imperative to respect the animal and to take care when using your knife and your saws. The rack of lamb, the most expensive cut on the carcass, retails in the UK for an average of thirty pounds per kilo of free-range meat (roughly forty dollars).
Mastering the breakdown of a lamb is essential in another sense: once you understand the anatomy of a lamb, you can apply this understanding to other bovine beasts, large and small. A lamb is the first step in this chain of mastery, with bone and muscle structure that is almost identical to that of a pig, whose anatomy is similar to a cow, only smaller. The larger the animal, the more muscles there are to break apart, but the principle is the same.
To begin, source a carcass of lamb from your local butcher. Most good butcheries will deal with lamb in carcass form, so it shouldn’t be hard to find one. The fat should be creamy and white and the muscle beneath barely visible. If the muscles are visible through the top layer of skin, the meat will be lean and the animal is probably a bit older than lamb age (twelve months or less). You’ll also need a good-quality boning knife and a handsaw.
Place the lamb on a large, clean workspace with its cavity facing upward. The cavity is the area, hidden by the breasts, where the organs have been removed. The first step is to remove the breasts. At the front of the lamb are its forelegs, which will be bent slightly. Make the first cut just below them and run your knife from there down the cavity, tapering off toward the legs. Do the same on the other side—this will leave you with two breasts marked out in long oval shapes.
With your handsaw, begin at the top of the carcass and remove the breasts by using one hand to saw through the bone and the other to pull the meat slightly. You should only go through bone for half of the breast—the rest can be removed by using your boning knife to cut through the fat and skin. Do not put too much pressure on the saw. The trick is to let the saw do most of the work. The more you push, the harder it will be.
Once the breasts are removed, you should be able to see inside of the carcass and clearly make out the ribs running the length of it. Rib bones one to five are the shoulder and six to twelve are the rack of lamb. After the rack comes the saddle, then the chump and legs.
By removing the breasts you’ve allowed yourself clear space to cut between the bones. Count five ribs and make a long cut to the spine in between bones five and six on each side. Ideally the cuts you make should meet in the middle, separated by the spine. Using your handsaw, remove the shoulders by sawing through the spine.
Next, the rack of lamb. At this point, you can remove most of the primal cuts by utilizing the cartilage in between each spinal joint to your advantage. If you get your knife in the right spot, it’s possible to break the joint without using your saw at all. For now, though, we’ll use our saw so that you can learn the places to cut.
Count eight ribs. This is your lamb’s best end, where the racks come from. After the eighth bone, make a cut down to the spine just as you did with the shoulders and use the saw to separate them from the carcass as you did before. Set them aside.
The saddle, chump, and legs should be all you have left in front of you. Separating these could well be a little trickier, as you’ll have to find the joints in between and use those.
Depending on where they’ve trained, some butchers leave the chump on the loin. In my experience, we’ve always taken the legs away from the carcass by leaving the chump on the legs. To do this, find the O-shaped cavity between the two legs at the bottom of the spine. You may need to remove a little fat and sinew, but have a look at the spine itself—you should see the joints. They’re the cartilage between each bone and they look like lowered white lines. If you still can’t figure it out, use the tip of your knife to explore—the knife should slide easily into the joint. If it doesn’t, that means you’ve hit bone and you’ll need to head a little farther north or south.
To remove the legs, count one joint up from the bottom of the spine and push your knife all the way through. Then use your saw to separate the saddle and legs.
Now you have your primal cuts of lamb—the shoulders, the rack, the saddle, and the legs. The next step is to prepare them further.
The shoulders are fairly simple to remove. Turn them upside down so that the neck is on the block and the ribs are facing you. Using your knife, cut along the rib cage on each side and follow the bones around. The closer you cut to the bones, the less waste and the more meat will be left on the cut when you finally go to cook it. When you get to the bottom, you’ll hit the neck bone that separates the two shoulders. The neck bone runs down the center of the two joints, with a beautiful piece called the neck fillet on the underside. You’ll want to keep that on the shoulder itself, so cut down the neck on each side and move your knife around the knobbly joints.
Next, the rack of lamb. The first step is to chine the rack, meaning to remove the rack from the spine for ease of carving. Place the blade of your saw parallel to the spine of the rack and move it upward by around an inch. Saw very gently—you’ll want to cut through the bone but stop before you hit the meat. One you’ve cut through the bone, remove the rack from the spine by scooping the eye of meat away from the large spine bone. Do the same on the other side.
The saddle is great for lamb chops. You’ll need to use your prowess in finding the joints of the spine to cut through the chops here without damaging too much of the delicate meat with the saw. If you can’t see the spine clearly (it should be in the center of two small strips of fillet), then remove some of the fat and the veins that run down the length of it. Ideally you will be able to see the spine clearly enough to know where to put your knife.
Poke the tip of your knife through each joint of the spine. This can be a little tougher to do, as there is also a small bit of cartilage on each side that needs to be cut through. Push as far through as you can, then use your saw to cut the chops away from the piece. Do this four more times and you have your Barnsley chops (essentially, double lamb T-bones). Don’t be tempted to cut some of the straggly tail meat off—that’s where all of the fatty flavor lies.
The legs are the trickiest to remove from the bone, given that the bone they’re attached to is an irregular “aitch” shape. The aitch bone is essentially the same shape as our pelvis, with intricate lumps and bumps that require some concentration to work free.
The first job is to remove the meat from the upper part of the bone. Using the very tip of your knife, make cuts around any visible parts of the bone. The top part of the aitch bone is similar in shape to that in the saddle—a cross shape where you’ll have to first remove meat from the top, then work your way around the corners to the bottom. There’s really no way of explaining the best way to do this—all you can do is take your time and explore the bone structure, cutting as close as you can to the aitch.
Once you’ve removed as much as you can from the top part of the aitch bone, start to delve a little deeper—you’ll see where you need to cut as the two legs are separated by the bone an
d that bone only. You’ll find a socket soon enough—with the ball of the femur bone tucked inside. You’re nearly there, but you will need to remove the ball from the joint socket to continue your butchery. The best way of doing this is to be firm—push the point of your knife into the socket and twist it until you feel the joint come free. Once it’s free, you’ll find that you can much more easily identify the bottom of the aitch bone. Go back to using the tip of your knife to cut around the remaining part of the bone and separate any remaining meat to free the leg entirely.
Any spare bones from the shoulder or leg that you are left with can be sawed into smaller pieces and used for stock.
Tying a Butcher’s Knot
Tying an easy, quick butcher’s knot is one of the most useful tricks you’ll ever learn. A good butcher’s knot can be the difference between a neatly prepared roast and one that falls apart in the oven. Heck, you can even use a butcher’s knot when you’re camping to tie down your tent if you really want to.
It goes without saying that almost all butchers will have been taught a different way of tying the knot, with each one arriving at the same end goal. For five years I used a technique that I’d been shown during my time at the farm shop, only to have a colleague teach me a new, easier, and altogether quicker way that would save me tons of time and fooling around with string and fingers.
The type of string you use is paramount—make sure that you have butcher’s twine on hand and do not, under any circumstances, no matter the emergency, use regular string from the hardware store. Butcher’s twine has been specially made out of fibers that won’t singe while cooking and therefore won’t affect the flavor of whatever it is you’re cooking.
First, find yourself something to tie the twine around. Start with a boneless pork loin, perhaps—it’s small enough to be easy to manage but big enough not to prove too fiddly. Get your butcher to give you a boneless loin with no strings on it and buy a roll of twine off him or her, too.
Place the meat on a board in front of you and put the ball of twine in your apron pocket (don’t try putting it in your jeans pocket, as you will need your ball to move freely and unroll as you work). If you don’t have an apron, place a bowl on the ground between your feet, with your ball of twine resting in the bowl.
Put the loose end of the twine in your right hand, and using your left, grip it around 12 inches (30 cm) lower down. Pull the loose end below the piece of meat and shimmy it down to the very center of the loin. Your right hand with the loose end should be slightly raised, with your other hand still holding the tighter end close to the board.
Adjust your grip slightly on the tight end and lay it across your index and middle fingers. This is the basis of the loop you’re about to make. Pull the loose end back across the meat to meet your two fingers. The two ends of twine should be lying next to each other.
Wrap the loose end of twine around the back of your two fingers to form a loop, then before bringing it all the way back around, cross it over the tight end. Tuck it through the loop you’ve just made once, and then twice.
Using the tight end of the twine, pull to tighten the knot. Tighten it as far as you can by placing two fingers on the knot to push it closer to the meat. Finish off with a regular knot on top to secure and cut the ends free.
Five
Panic set in as the end of my writing degree edged closer. My classmates were starting to find jobs that would take them from the classroom and into the real world. At some point along the way, in spite of the part-time work I was doing at the Ginger Pig, I had decided that I wanted an office job. As graduation approached, friends’ parents would ask me about my plans, and telling them that I was going to spend my life behind a butcher counter serving customers just didn’t feel like the right answer. Sitting behind a desk somehow felt important, like it would give me authority and was grown-up. I loved the culture at the Ginger Pig, but I began to feel desperate to get away from the counter.
Shortly after my first real Christmas at the Ginger Pig (i.e., one where none of my family members had conveniently died), Erika, whom I’d worked with in Marylebone during my first few months at the Ginger Pig, had been promoted to manager of the Hackney shop. The shop needed a complete face-lift and new staff members, and I was brought over to help. During this time, I was studying at university three days a week and flitting between Borough Market and Hackney for the other four. Erika was a thorough manager; she knew what she wanted and she could run a tight ship. I was known to be good with customer service, and for that I had my overly polite parents to thank. I had mastered “Sir” and “Madam,” and I understood the kind of attention that customers needed. Often, although my week was meant to be split between just the two shops, I was actually being used as cover and darting between three or four shops, traveling from South London an hour east or an hour and a bit west. I was juggling a lot—working with new people and again having to convince an entirely new crew that I wasn’t just a counter girl, that I could do other things.
Above all of us, in the Ginger Pig’s head London office, were two women whom we rarely saw. They worked for Tim and ran the show. There was Naomi, our operations manager, whose job it was to make sure that nothing was broken, that our rosters ran smoothly and efficiently, and that any complaints were dealt with quickly. She was a sort-of friend of mine, a little nerdy yet somehow effortlessly cool, living with her graphic designer girlfriend who’d produced work for some of the biggest brands in the world. It seemed as though working at the Ginger Pig was just her hobby. Alongside her was Michelle, who ran PR and Communications, and who’d recently had her title changed to something to do with product development. We joked about this in the shops, unsure as to how you could make a full-time role out of developing products in butchery, but there she was.
Naomi and Michelle’s management approach caused a volatile kind of friction in the ranks. Their style was to occasionally drop in to one of the shops, act friendly with the butchers, take their free meat, and disappear for two months. The butchers resented the fact that these two women, who had little to no butchery training, had been given control of six shops and could effectively yay or nay any decision that passed through them no matter how many people it affected. Some of the butchers and a lot of weekend staff had never even met them, and they liked to pretend they didn’t know who they were when either of them called on the phone to ask for a favor. Neither Michelle nor Naomi seemed to understand the tension that their management style was causing.
Managerial teams, I was learning, had to be careful around butchers. A butcher’s knowledge was sacred; they’d worked hard for it, and the entitlement was strong. Most butchers’ attitude was that if you sat at a desk all day, your work wasn’t as valuable as the physical work they did behind a counter. The girls hadn’t done much to curry the butchers’ favor, and as a result they developed a pretty bad rep.
In spite of how unpopular they were among the staff, the jealousy I felt for Naomi and Michelle was enormous. Flitting between meetings, doing deals with journalists and PR firms, and running the operational side of the shops seemed like the ultimate working life for me. I sent an email to Naomi asking whether they needed extra help around the office. She replied almost immediately, and I started two weeks later as what was essentially their office dogsbody.
As soon as I started, Michelle left and a new marketing manager was hired. Sophie was in her mid- to late twenties, very beautiful, and extremely well spoken. When making a joke, she would pause for a few seconds to think about whether she should laugh or not. She took herself extremely seriously and constantly complained about her relationship with a boyfriend who sounded to all of us like a pretty awful guy. Each Monday there’d be a new bunch of flowers on her desk from him, after a weekend of fighting. She’d moan about how lovely they were as if it were an inconvenience to her, making faces at their luscious smell; by Wednesday they were in the trash.
It soon became apparent that working for Naomi and Sophie was not going to be
the pleasant office job that I’d been hoping for. Sophie was a complete and utter control freak. Each day would begin with me sifting through twelve weekend newspapers in search of articles that mentioned the Ginger Pig and then writing up a media report based on strict structural guidelines she’d given me to send to the shops, to Tim himself, and to any relevant manager up in the office at the farm in Yorkshire. I knew that the media report was never read—it almost always went straight into the trash folder after landing in people’s inboxes. Once the media report was done, Sophie would select around five emails from her inbox for me to draft replies to. These replies were then sent back to her to proofread, before she sent them back to me to then send on to the intended receiver. Almost always they were requests from local schools, energy suppliers, or firms looking for us to pay for advertising. None of the replies were more than two sentences long, but each one was pored over before it was actually sent. Then, if there were no errands for me to do, Sophie might let me write a short email to send out to press or update her Excel document of a thousand or so names of journalists who might be interested in writing about us. Most journalists we pitched never replied, and the few that did responded directly to Sophie.