Girl on the Block Page 6

  FOSTER SUNDRY

  Brooklyn, New York

  Cara Nicoletti is as close as they come to a celebrity butcher, hosting her own show on VICE TV and famed for the incredible array of flavored sausages she makes at Brooklyn’s Foster Sundry. She’s a fourth-generation butcher, and she’ll admit that since working behind the counter, she eats less meat, incorporating ingredients like kale and pesto into her sausages.

  JOCELYN GUEST AND ERIKA NAKAMURA

  TBD

  Guest and Nakamura were formerly partners with April Bloomfield at White Gold Butchers in New York City. It’s still up in the air as to where these two meat mavens will end up next, but keep a close eye on their Instagram. Whatever their next venture is, it’s guaranteed to involve some incredible butchery skills and some stellar meat.

  CHICAGO MEAT COLLECTIVE

  Chicago, Illinois

  The Chicago Meat Collective is not so much a butcher shop as an education center dedicated to offering a wide range of courses in whole-animal butchery to home cooks. Founded by McCullough Kelly-Willis in 2013, the school boasts a number of female instructors.

  SEBASTIAN & CO, VANCOUVER

  British Columbia

  Headed by Tess Fuller, a renowned female butcher who boasts more than thirty thousand Instagram followers and some serious knife skills, Sebastian & Co is widely recognized as the best butcher shop in Vancouver. This shop takes quality and nose-to-tail seriously.

  CHARLOTTE’S BUTCHERY

  Newcastle, UK

  Known as “The Girl Butcher,” Charlotte Mitchell was one of the first female butchers to gain fame in the UK when she began in the trade as a university student. Ten years later, Newcastle’s only female-fronted butcher shop was born.

  YE OLDE SAUSAGE SHOP

  Oswaldtwistle, UK

  Co-owned by Jessica Leliuga, Ye Olde is famous in its area for catering to its customer base with a fantastic oven-ready selection. Leliuga’s award-winning artisanal skills are what make this shop special, and she was even chosen to represent Great Britain at the World Butchers’ Challenge 2018.

  VICTOR CHURCHILL

  New South Wales, Australia

  Anthony Bourdain once described this shop as the most beautiful butcher shop in the world. He wasn’t wrong. To me, VC is the pinnacle, and it boasts some of the most incredible suppliers, produce, charcuterie, and delicatessen items in Australia. Working there alongside Head Butcher Mickey Peacock is Luci Kington, whose dedication and talent exceeds anything I’ve seen before and who was trained in part by master butcher Darren O'Rourke.

  GARY’S QUALITY MEATS

  South Yarra, Australia

  A fourth-generation butcher, Gary McBean also employs Ashleigh McBean, his daughter, who has been butchering for thirteen years. With an expertise in dry-aging, Gary’s hosts an impressive counter display as well as a fantastic uniform of leather aprons and flat caps. The real deal.

  Three

  When my eighteenth birthday approached, I had been at the farm shop for a year. Once I turned eighteen I would be old enough to learn to use the heavier machinery in the butchery. I was chomping at the bit to do some real work, no matter if no one really wanted to come forward to teach me. Saturday and Sunday mornings I would get up for work before sunrise, pull on a long-sleeve jersey and black jeans, and straighten my hair a little and throw it into a rough ponytail while my dad warmed up my car. We’d drive out of town toward the country, over the moors as the mist hung low and the frost bit at the heather. As the sun came up I’d walk through the double doors and to the staff room, returning to the shop floor in my heavy steel-toed boots and frumpy overcoat. When the shop closed, it was a mad dash to scrub the floors, the walls, and the counter, before the staff room filled quickly with others desperate to leave. We were out the door by five forty-five, and I was into the front seat of my red Suzuki Swift for a speedy drive home through the valley. One day blended into the next, and I yearned for more hands-on work and more responsibility.

  Beyond my duties opening the shop, it was difficult to ascertain what my actual job entailed. Employed as a customer service assistant, I flitted between the fridges and the counter, prepping the ready-to-eat section while trying to serve customers at the same time. Life was made difficult by Julie, a foul-tempered, self-important supervisor who lorded over the customer service staff. She constantly paced the floor, peering toward the counter to be sure that Adam and I were out front where we should be rather than in the back helping the butchers with any of the preparations. As far as she was concerned, we belonged to the shop floor and not to the butchery. Tensions between the two departments were high. Given the low wages and long hours set by management, there was constant turnover at the farm shop, and we were always short staffed.

  In the early months of the year, after Laura and Steve had meddled and pushed us together, Adam and I went on a few “dates.” Our courtship was fairly short-lived. Since I was seventeen then, and not quite old enough to legally drink, Adam would buy me vodka cokes on the sly while I waited for him in the smoking area of some grotty countryside pub. He would poke fun at me, rather like a brother would make fun of his sister, and we would walk around the center of town until it got dark. The highlight of our relationship, if you could call it that, involved him groping me in the back row of a busy cinema while I awkwardly shoved my hand down his trousers. Shortly after the final cinema episode, Adam returned to university in Durham, and after that only spent a few weekends each term back at home and working a shift. I quickly became annoyed that Adam’s attentions weren’t solely focused on me while he was at school, and I reunited with an ex-boyfriend. I barely saw Adam after that, but when I did it was typically in the staff room with him flinging jokes at me that bordered on nasty—not something I looked forward to. That summer, he came back to Derbyshire for a few months, seemingly more mellow and with a new girlfriend.

  In spite of my frustrations with the job—the repetitive, simple tasks and the lack of responsibility—I remained desperate for the butchers’ acceptance. I would go out of my way to listen to their grievances, and soon I developed the same animosity that they harbored toward the management team, who dictated their product selection and berated them for the waste they produced, complaining that it was hurting profits. There seemed to be fear among management of letting the butchers have too much power. Things became petty and unfair, and the butchers were often treated like children, their hard-won knowledge disrespected at every opportunity.

  These men had grown up in the industry, working in shops from age twelve or thirteen, beginning with lowly jobs like scrubbing the fat and blood from the floor or linking sausages for hours on end. They’d worked hard to learn their craft from the generation before them, working their way up in the trade until they owned or at least co-owned their own shops, many of which had gone under during the recession, leading them to the farm shop. Now, being told what to cut, how to behave, and what to sell in a shop that didn’t belong to them was difficult to swallow.

  “They think we don’t know what our customers like?”

  The friction between the butchers and management really boiled down to pride.

  Yet strangely this feud turned out to work in my favor. As customer service assistants, Adam and I often found ourselves pulled in different directions, between the counter and prep work. One Saturday in July, while we were threading chunks of fatty marinated pork onto kebab sticks (we’d make perhaps five hundred a day), Julie stormed across the floor and into the back room. It was clear that she was angry; she had removed the straw boater hat from her head and clutched the rim in her fist until the straw had started snap. Adam and I grimaced at the sight of her.

  “Where’s the boss? Where’s Steve?”

  We both looked up, and then at each other.

  “He’s in the fridge.”

  Someone shouted for Steve, and he wandered outside. One look at Julie and his teeth gritted, leaving the sagging skin around his jaw loose and trembling.<
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  “Yes?” he said.

  “Next time I see these two out the back helping you, there’s going to be trouble,” she screeched, her face quickly turning red. Her plump cheeks shook as she yelled, crushing that hideous hat in her hands and brandishing it at Steve. “I’m having them back behind the tills. They’re not butcher staff.”

  “Oh, give over, Julie,” Steve hissed. I’d never heard the man swear and wondered if now might be the time, but he said no more and simply gave Julie a withering stare.

  Julie stormed back out again, and when Adam and I didn’t follow her, she turned, pointed toward the shop floor, and screeched, “Out!” Adam looked at Steve apologetically, and we both put down the meat and kebab sticks, removed the blue gloves from our hands, and trudged out to the tills. For the rest of the afternoon, we did our best to look bored.

  The following week, Steve marched up to the manager’s office and told him that he wanted Adam and me helping the butchers out back, that it was a waste of two good staff members to have us spending our days behind the tills when there was real work that we could do. To Julie’s aggravation, the following week we were back in the workroom again.

  And this time there was a change. I couldn’t quite figure out why, but the butchers were offering to teach me things: how to tie a butcher’s knot, how to roll legs and shoulders of lamb. And when I touched a piece of meat in the counter that wasn’t chicken, they no longer winced. I even convinced Ian to show me how to break down a lamb. A few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, he set aside an hour of his day to teach me. The other butchers, especially Harris, told him he should be careful, that they didn’t have insurance coverage if I accidentally slit my wrist or worse, and that they wouldn’t be able to sell the cuts I’d made if they weren’t up to scratch. I was convinced that I’d go in on the designated Saturday eager and raring to go only to be handed the Windex and a cloth, but Ian kept his word. There were two knives and a saw put aside for me: a boning knife, small with a straight edge, and a steak knife, long with a curved blade. I had a rough idea what each was for, but he rehashed it all for me anyway. I let him talk, worried that if I interrupted or said I already knew about something he was explaining he would stop the lesson early.

  Ian had asked Harris to pull a lamb from the fridge, and I stood awkwardly at the workbench while they were talking about which one to use. They unhooked something from a rail, hooked it back on, shifted some carcasses about, and finally settled on the right one. Harris came out of the fridge carrying it over his shoulder and heaved it onto the block with a thud that shook the thick wood. I’d been imagining something larger, but up close the lamb was small, stiff with death, with rosy flesh peeping softly through the white covering of fat over its body. The rest of the butchers had stopped to watch, waiting for my reaction, but I resisted giving them one and instead just gazed down at the lamb with what I hoped looked like vague interest. They went back to their work soon afterward, glancing up every now and then beneath the brim of their hats.

  My first carcass. I’d been imagining this moment since Ian had first agreed to teach me. Until this point, I hadn’t come face-to-face with a whole dead animal. Dealing with the smaller, more manageable parts was an entirely different thing, and all I had to do was avoid the second fridge, where the carcasses were kept, to ignore this harsh reality. With the whole lamb in front of me, I was struck with a sickly, tingling sensation. My brain did nothing to disassociate this animal from Easter, daffodils, and tiny, wool-covered lambs bleating softly.

  With the tip of his knife, Ian began by making long surgical incisions close to the stomach, where the skin was loose and cream colored. He pulled the skin apart.

  “You alright?”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay then . . .”

  Harris, on cue, brought out the second lamb. Running down its belly, from the bottom of the neck all the way to the bowels, there was a two-inch-wide gaping cavity. Ian told me to look into the cavity, where all of the organs would normally be. He used his hands to prize both sides of the cavity apart a little, and I could see that it was empty. The only things left inside were the two blush pink kidneys encased in silver skin and a thick, bright white clump of fat.

  “I’ll take the breasts off—it’s tricky the first time,” Ian said, picking up his knife, greasy with the melting fat. He removed about six inches worth of rib bone on each side of the carcass opening so that I could count the ribs from the inside. He had opened up a long, ten-inch-wide hole running the length of the body.

  “Now,” he said, and handed the knife to me, despite my own lying on the side next to me. This was his knife, his initial chipped into the side and two small elastic bands around the handle to distinguish it from the rest. It was so old now that the blade, perhaps an inch or so wide, was hardly more than a flint. “Count five ribs, cut between the fifth and the sixth.”

  I did as I was told. The knife was sharp, and it glided straight through the flesh. When I hit the spine, I couldn’t go any farther.

  “Same on the other side,” he said, and as I did, he picked up the handsaw from the block and handed it to me. “Sawing bone is the same as sawing wood.”

  I was eighteen. I’d never sawed anything.

  “Start slowly,” he said.

  I picked up the saw, lighter than I’d imagined, and pushed it through the bone. It staggered slightly, got smoother, and then worse again, until I was forcing it with all my might to even make a dent in the bone.

  “Don’t put too much pressure on. Let the saw do the work.”

  That seemed like an odd thing to say. Saws didn’t work unless you pushed them, but I eased off and the blade went straight again, until I was through the other side and sawing the meat with a squelch.

  “Stop, stop, stop.”

  I froze. He took the saw from me and twisted the lamb’s body around to work on the legs. He showed me a joint, above a hollow where the intestines would lie, that you could push your knife through. I had no idea that bodies were this easy to break down, almost like a puzzle. Between each vertebra was a soft spot, and the tip of the knife went in easily almost to the other side, allowing a break in the spine. The legs came off in a pair.

  Ian rolled the legs to one side and pushed the loin toward me, instructing me to remove the kidneys.

  “How?”

  “Just pull,” he said.

  But they wouldn’t come away easily. It wasn’t just a matter of pulling; it was a matter of holding the loin in place with one hand and using all my strength to tear them out with the other. When the first one finally came loose, the sound was terrifying, a horrific noise like tearing fabric that echoed around the room.

  Ian watched my work closely, every now and then moving the carcass a bit to the correct angle, taking the knife from me and demonstrating what he meant. The lamb was now broken into three larger pieces: the legs in a pair, the loin, and the shoulders. Ian took the pair of legs from me and began showing me how to remove one from what he called the “aitch” bone—the H-shaped bone that attached the legs to the pelvis. But he worked too quickly for me to really absorb what he was doing, pushing the blade through the ball of a joint, peeling away thick layers of meat from the femur. He passed the lamb over to me to remove the second leg but got frustrated when I didn’t know from the get-go what to do. Nevertheless, with a little guidance, I managed it. Granted, my aitch bone was covered in the deep pink meat, and Ian made sure I knew how much waste that was, but I had managed it with no major hiccups.

  He rolled both of the legs across the wood to Harris on the other block, who worked quickly to turn each one into something we’d put into the counter later. Then the shoulders went to Richie, who moved fast: knife in, twisting, pulling, working with a new energy and pushing the saws violently through bone as though they wanted to show me how it was really done. Richie seemed to take pity on me and beckoned me over to his block where he was removing the shoulders from the neck bone. He showed me how to cut off the
smaller parts that the customer wouldn’t want to see, like the very ends of the forelegs that were rigid with rigor mortis. Next, he tackled the rack of lamb, explaining as best he could how to French trim the rack for aesthetic, scraping each of the rib bones half clean. He explained that this technique might take me a while to learn, but that it was one of the most satisfying jobs butchery had to offer. To this day, French trimming (Frenching, as it’s known in the US) rib bones on beef, lamb, and pork is my favorite job, perhaps because it was the first skill I actively learned, or maybe because of the satisfaction that comes with it. Gently, with a knife, a few inches of meat at the top of the ribs are removed, and then with a designated blunter knife, the bones are scraped clean until the dull grayness of them is clear and white against the red meat itself.

  When I got home that evening, I showered immediately, standing under the hot water until it scalded my skin and staring up at the ceiling. I used my mum’s heavily scented bath oils to scrub my body of the strong lamb smell. I bit my nails later that night in front of the television and tasted the metallic scraps. Driving to work the week afterward, I could barely bring myself to look out into the fields of rural Derbyshire, not wanting to see the baby lambs of the later summer months frolicking among the daffodils.

  AS HUMANS, OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH MEAT IS COMPLEX AND VERY individual. Some of us strive to educate ourselves on provenance, on breeds and farming. Others are less concerned with the finer details and stick to shopping in the supermarket for our meat because price is important and we know the quality is good enough. Plenty of meat eaters out there are content to ignore the supply chain completely, along with all that goes on behind the scenes of the meat industry. For these people, butcher shops aren’t and never will be a necessity. There are also those who abstain from meat for ethical or health reasons. A recent survey showed that 3 percent of Americans are vegan and that an additional 5 percent are vegetarian. Nevertheless, most people on the planet, be they flexitarians or hard-core meat lovers, eat meat on a daily basis. Traditionally meat is the main component of a meal and a vegetable side is an afterthought. Most restaurants will have a vegetarian or even a vegan dish on the menu, but we feel as though we are depriving ourselves if we order it, because in our heads, a meal without meat is not a meal.