Girl on the Block Page 9

  “I’ll take you to my office and we can have a chat.”

  What Tim actually meant by his office was his favorite lunch spot, a Patisserie Valerie chain café a few yards down Marylebone High Street.

  We sat down at a table toward the back of the restaurant, even though there was barely anyone inside. I ordered a cup of tea, and he ordered one, too, plus a croissant.

  “Do you want anything to eat?”

  I shook my head, although my student stomach was rumbling angrily and audibly.

  “Thanks, no thanks.”

  Once we’d ordered, he leaned back in his chair, folding his broad arms across his chest. He studied me carefully and finally spoke when the tea arrived, offering me the small pitcher of milk for my cup first.

  “So then. What can you do?”

  This wasn’t a question I’d expected. I was not a trained butcher, certainly not by his standards. Did he have any idea how much I didn’t know? How much I hadn’t been taught? Would he quiz me on cuts? If he did, how well could I remember those complex names I’d seen in his counter just moments ago? Not well at all, it turns out, and as I scrambled desperately for an answer that would impress, a feeling of complete inadequacy flowed over me.

  “Well, I know quite a bit about meat . . . I worked for a farm shop in Derbyshire for three and a bit years with the butchers. I had my own section of the counter with chicken products . . . I . . .”

  “John told me where you worked,” he said. I couldn’t tell if this was a good thing or a bad thing. His voice had a confusing quality to it, with no way of really telling whether he was interested in the conversation at all.

  He began to take small bites at his croissant, and small flakes of thin pastry fell delicately onto the wool of his jumper, nestling on his chest. He used a napkin to wipe the corners of his mouth and then he dusted off his jumper and knees and refolded his arms. Down to business, it seemed.

  “We need someone in Marylebone at the weekends. We’ve got a new manager in there and he needs a bit of help. They have some good butchers there at the moment; you’ll like Erika. Can you do a trial this Saturday?”

  My heart sunk. I’d been hoping for Borough Market. Marylebone seemed a world away.

  “I can do Saturday, yes.”

  As if the deal was then done, he asked for the bill, which I feebly offered to split with him by rummaging through my purse full of change before he firmly declined. We got up and walked back to the shop in silence, weaving in and out of suits on their way to the office. Before we were even through the door, the butchers behind the counter had spotted him through the window and were making themselves look busy.

  He announced to everyone that I would be coming in on Saturday for a trial shift, that I had worked in a famous farm shop and that I knew what I was doing. After our conversation in the café, this couldn’t have been further from the outcome that I’d expected.

  “Jack, you’ll look after her, won’t you?”

  One of the butchers looked up with small, dark eyes that matched his black stubble and hair gelled downward until it shone beneath the overhead lamp. He looked me up and down.

  “Yeah, but you can’t be wearing any of this. It’s not a fashion show.”

  “I know. I’ve worked in butchers before,” I snapped.

  “Alright, then,” he said. “See you at eight o’clock. Do you students get up that early?”

  There were sniggers behind the counter. Before I left, I slipped off my rings and dropped them in my pocket. They jangled all the way home.

  THAT SATURDAY I ARRIVED EARLY AT THE MARYLEBONE SHOP, EAGER to make a good impression. I knew from experience that butchers appreciate an early start, with most rising at five thirty and starting work at seven. It gave them a great sense of entitlement that they could lord over you.

  It was seven thirty. The front door was still locked, and when I peered in through the window there was no one around except a middle-aged suntanned lady taking something out of the stacked pizza ovens in the corner behind the deli counter. I knocked on the door and she looked up at me blankly, before waving her hands and mouthing, “We’re closed!”

  I shook my head. How else to communicate that you’re there for a trial shift other than to keep knocking? So that’s what I did. Flustered, she heaved a thick iron pot up onto a metal workbench and trudged slowly over to the door, reaching up to unlock it and swinging it open. I explained myself, and once she understood why I was there, the poor thing looked embarrassed. She smoothed down the polyester material of the gilet she was wearing and ran her hands over her rough blond updo.

  “Oh! Jessica. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She spoke with an Eastern European accent; high pitched and intonation in the wrong places.

  “Come in, come in.”

  Still, she didn’t seem to relax, and I wondered if it was her first day, too. She put her hand to her head to gather her thoughts before beckoning me to the staircase and screeching a name to the floor below.

  “Piotr! Piotr!”

  Below, someone rumbled a reply. Down the steep staircase, the basement was kitted out with an office space, a prep area, and a kitchen with a large table around which three butchers sat. Piotr, the new manager at Marylebone about whom Tim had expressed concern, stood first to greet me. He was four or five inches shorter than I, with broad shoulders and skinny legs accentuated by the loose fit of his black trousers. His dark hair had been styled into a soft spike in the middle of his head with too much wax. He held out his hand to me and shook with a tight grip.

  “Thank you, Vida. Nice to meet you, Jessica.” Piotr’s voice was soft and more feminine than I’d expected. He took a step back, placing his hands on his hips and broadening out his chest, showing defined pectorals and biceps beneath his T-shirt. He turned to the two other butchers seated at the table. “Erika, Jack, this is Jessica. She is on trial today.”

  Erika, the female butcher that Tim had mentioned to me, stood up. She was my height, but slimmer, with large breasts beneath a black button-down, gripping a can of Red Bull in one hand and a packet of cigarettes with a foreign label in the other. Her hair was bottle blond, but with absolutely no sign of roots, the cover so comprehensive that I almost believed it to be natural. She held out her hand—perfectly shaped nails, slim fingers, and soft palms when I shook. This woman was a butcher? I’d spent a year out of the game at university and still my hands were rough, my nails were a mess. I couldn’t comprehend how she managed to maintain such a flawless exterior while working this job. Her accent was similar to Vida’s, with an odd emphasis on certain syllables. They spoke to each other in Lithuanian, a language that sounded quick and complicated and exotic to my untrained ear.

  Jack was the other butcher I’d met on the day of my interview, who’d commented on my outfit. It seemed to me that he was the butcher who thought that he worked harder than everyone else, the butcher who didn’t get paid enough, the butcher who cut up four lambs and was done for the day, refusing to allow anyone to question his work ethic. He probably didn’t believe that women had a place in the meat industry, and he certainly didn’t enjoy getting to know new staff members. I had thought about him a lot over the past week, about proving him wrong, watching YouTube videos of skills I’d already learned to make sure I wouldn’t fuck up, going over anatomy in the food books I had at home, and listening to podcasts by chefs and food writers in the shower.

  As he shook my hand, a wry smile spread across his face. He took my palm, turned it over, and pretended to inspect my fingers.

  “No rings today?”

  “Not when I’m behind a counter.”

  I’d expected Piotr to notice the tension and step in, but he wasn’t any easier on me.

  “So, trial today. We need someone to work hard, someone who . . . someone who takes the job seriously. At the end of the day, if we don’t like you, you won’t get the job. Okay?”

  I couldn’t tell whether he was joking, so I smiled, but no one returned the smile. My ha
nds shook as I put my boots on, steeling myself for a day of embarrassment and struggling to keep my head above water.

  After some introductory chitchat, I was shown the till system by Erika under the instruction of Piotr, who compared running through a transaction to something close to rocket science. I wondered if they were going to block test me, putting a side of pork or some other cut in front of me and watching as I struggled to break it down. But they didn’t. Instead, Piotr ran me through the counter comprehensively, what cuts went where, what absolutely didn’t fly with him. He would frequently reach in to correct what Erika and Jack had done, slightly moving the roasting joint or tray that they’d just placed inside. I couldn’t see anything wrong with their work, and it quickly became clear that he was doing it to undermine them, making sure that they understood that he was watching them. The atmosphere was tense. I saw why Tim said he needed a hand.

  I spent most of my first day cleaning. Erika was kind enough to talk me through the cuts, and I felt comfortable enough around her to ask questions. When Piotr went to smoke outside, which he did a lot, she would beckon me over to the block to help her cut slices of veal for scaloppini and remove the breasts and legs from bright white chicken carcasses. At the end of the day, I thanked her. She said she had liked my jacket on the day of my interview and asked if we could go out shopping sometime.

  I got a call the following day asking if I could work more shifts. There was apparently the need for a polite, fluent English speaker at Moxon Street, as the Marylebone store was also known. It was the highest earner of the five Ginger Pig shops, but management got a lot of flack from the neighborhood’s snobbier residents about the number of Eastern European butchers working there. Vida, her daughter Emma, their family friend Loretta, Monika, and Erika all spoke to each other in Lithuanian across the counters. Piotr and his brother Daniel and another of the delicatessen girls were Eastern European and spoke to each other in their own complex language, although sometimes Piotr would catch himself, aware of warnings he’d been given by the managerial team, and scream across the floor: “English, please!” The way I saw it, the Ginger Pig at 8-10 Moxon Street was the perfect representation of London—a melting pot of different cultures, colorful, vibrant, and enthusiastic.

  From what I could tell, the real problem was Piotr’s management style rather than any language barrier. He was desperate at all times to prove his worth: first in through the door in the morning, ready to chastise anyone who came in after he did, and last out at night. His ability to delegate was impressive—at all times we had something to do, but then he almost always interfered with whatever task he’d assigned as he watched over us to critique. He had figured out what I was good at: laying sausages on a tray in a neat way and French trimming racks of lamb. Still, he managed to stop me halfway through to tell me how he preferred it to be done, allowing me to carry on only after I’d confirmed I understood that his way was better.

  The meat often came into the shops in skips that each held around twenty kilos of meat and conveniently stacked one on top of another in the fridge. Each week, Piotr would save sixty kilos of lamb racks for me to trim. French trimming is laborious and fiddly, and it can only be done with the very edge of a knife, forcing the meat away from each of the eight individual bones by scraping at a certain angle. After ten or twelve racks, your wrists begin to ache, but I would spend all afternoon in between serving customers trimming three skips worth of the lamb, probably forty kilos in total. If I tried to cut something else, Piotr would steer me back to the lamb, handing me the bluntest knife he could find and tucking me away in the corner.

  Looking back now, I do understand, at least in part, Piotr’s distrust and his reluctance to demonstrate or to let me work on other cuts of meat. In this job, meat is money, and it of course makes little sense to let the least experienced person on the block loose on a piece of tenderloin.

  But I was good. I tried hard, I was eager to learn, and I knew that there was a lot more that I was capable of with a little guidance. Erika was the only one willing to take the time to listen to my questions and to teach me. She had a quick hand, a way of handling carcasses with care and precision. She seemed to know everything there was to know about cooking, seasoning, and where the meat came from. Customers came in to see her specifically because they knew that she would give them the very best service. I quickly realized that out of the three of them, she was the top butcher in the shop. I wanted to know what she knew. I would follow her around most of the day, going behind Piotr’s back to ask her what I could do to help, what needed to be done. I began to learn much more that way.

  Nevertheless, each week I would dread my encounters with Piotr. A few months in, Piotr called me over and told me to tie up some cuts of top round beef. The top round or topside, a large hunk of beef from the upper leg, should be trimmed of all the aged and oxidized fat and meat, cut into portions, and rolled with clean fat on top and neat strings. The task wasn’t too onerous, but my butcher’s knots were rusty after all of the months I’d spent out of the game. Yet it was something he’d never asked me to do before and therefore a total privilege. Feeling like I might have managed to earn a bit of respect, I took my time and was as neat as possible tying up the knots. Thanks to a combination of nerves and an eagle-eyed manager watching closely over my shoulder, the job I’d done wasn’t perfect, but it was better than anything I’d tried my hand at in the shop before. Piotr was immediately at my side when I asked what the next job was.

  “Hold on,” he said, and took the beef eagerly in his hands. Claret dripped from the muscle and rolled out and over his fingers, falling onto the wood below. “The test.”

  He elevated the cut about a yard above the block, over his head, and then threw it downward. Blood splattered up into my face, across my apron, and across the stainless steel back wall. With the impact of the meat on the block, the strings flew off, the pressure breaking the weak knots that I’d spent so long on, leaving the hunk of beef in a slug-like shape with the rough white fat around it almost totally broken.

  “Not tight enough. If it were tight, the strings wouldn’t have broken.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. He was already laughing, clearly amused at my failure.

  “Again.”

  So I did. I retied the joint twice more, and twice more he picked it up and threw it down, adamant that he would show me how badly I was doing at my job. In the end, I passed the beef over to Erika and asked her to finish it. I took my lunch break early and smoked five cigarettes in a row, sitting outside in the early spring sun. When I went back inside after lunch, three skips of lamb racks were waiting for me, stacked up by my place on the blocks in the corner, right next to the fridge, farthest from anyone else in the shop.

  AS WITH MY JOB AT THE FARM SHOP, I EVENTUALLY BEGAN TO DREAD going in to Marylebone. For almost six months, my responsibilities remained limited. I’d been for the most part relegated to cleaning windows, stacking sausages, and trimming racks of lamb. I’d tried to get involved in some real butchery to no avail, or to a mixed reaction from Piotr.

  Eventually I figured out that the only time I could get away with cutting meat was in front of a customer, when someone would ask for something that we either were low on or didn’t have in the case. Quietly, and without drawing attention to myself, I’d make my way into the huge dry-aging fridge at the back of the room and take one of the ribs, loins, or sirloins, dark and blackened with age, from the rack that stood facing outward in front of the sliding entrance door. I would choose the one with the most marbling, the most veins of thin white fat like lightning bolts dispersed through the meat. This was a lesson drilled into me from the very first weeks at the Ginger Pig: fat was flavor, the sort that the customers we were serving appreciated. On cue, as I emerged from the fridge, a hunk of beef cradled in my arms, Piotr would come running over no matter how tied up he was. Taking note of the customers around us, he would say, “Would you like me to help, Jess?” and I would say, “No, thanks, Piot
r, I can do it.” He would have no choice but to look on as I boned out a rib of beef or a short loin for the waiting patron and did it well, though never up to his standards.

  Beneath our wooden work blocks were two empty skips lined with thin blue plastic bags. Into the bag on the right we threw beef trim, the usable excess from a piece of meat that we’d reuse to make burgers of ground beef. We threw bones into the bag on the left, which would be taken away in two huge industrial bins every week by a plant that melted them down or threw them into a landfill. When there were no customers around, Piotr’s favorite activity was to bend down beneath the block to the skips and pick out everything that I’d just put in there. He would lay it all out neatly in front of me, or sometimes he would put it on the scale and weigh it to prove a point, critiquing the job I’d done. Too much meat left on the bone, not enough fat taken off, shoddy knife work around the chine bone. But the thing was, the thing I think that he hated, was that I was learning. Every single piece of meat I cut behind his back, or in front of him as he watched squirming, was helping me to learn and get better. I remember one instance when he picked everything out of the skips and had absolutely nothing to say.

  The meat at the Ginger Pig was like nothing I’d encountered before. The smell inside the fridge was completely new to me, somewhere between mild cheese and cooking fat. At the back, sides of pork and bodies of lamb hung on hooks, with rails and rails of ribs and loins for steaks sorted by age at the front of the fridge—the freshest at the bottom, the oldest at the top. The more they aged, the more pungent their smell. A few years later, at the Ginger Pig’s Hackney branch, my colleague Andrea (or “Pickles” to his colleagues) would describe the smell to me as “chocolate.”

  Someone early on had mentioned to me that only good butchers dry-age their meat. You could make good beef better just by leaving it in a fridge for a couple of weeks and essentially letting it rot from the outside in. It took me some time to take a dry-aged steak home from the Ginger Pig, in part due to some confusion over our staff discount. Officially, the discount was a generous 30 percent. However, everyone who worked at GP for some time knew that you could get away with not having to pay at all if you took small amounts of meat and didn’t do it too often. The cut I chose was a rib eye, which I’d had my eye on for an entire day before I actually took it for myself. The fat was plentiful—veins of marbling like webbing traveling through the entire piece—and the dry-aged steak was no longer a blush pink but a deep, blackened red color. Once I got home, I took my time reading the online instructions as to how best to cook it. I oiled the steak, not the pan, to prevent the oil from burning and charring the outside. I was generous with sea salt, constantly turned the beef so as not to burn it, and I pushed the eye of the fat down into the hot pan so that it rendered and crisped a little, basting from the inside out. I’d had dreams of conjuring up delicious side dishes of creamed spinach and roasted sweet potatoes, but in the end I got so impatient that I sliced the steak up as soon as it was out of the pan and ate it straight from the carving board.