Butcher

 

The sink is full of tongues. Beef tongues, each as big as a man's shoe, frozen into one icy clump the size of a propane canister, defrosting for an afternoon pickup. There's a lot of mouth, too, I guess, or palate -- I'm not sure, because the top tongue is unfrozen enough that I can see a bone that looks like a little saddle. But right now the guys in back are breaking cows -- sawing the hindquarters down with a handsaw, cutting the hip on the band saw, then the shank, thumbing out the ribs for short loin. Short loin is their money cut. No one is particularly worried about the tongues. You don't have to rush the tongues, they tell me.

"Who ordered tongues?" I ask. Sometimes it's loud in a butcher shop. The grinding saws or the clattering, the cuber, the vacuum sealer, the hasp and slam of the walk-in-refrigerator door, the radio. Not a cruel, industrial noise -- no one wears earplugs. This is the loudness of commerce, the fail-safe cadence of call-in orders, the rattling meter of the morning butcher-shop routine.

So far today I've hung three bone-in rib roasts for aging, trimmed and trayed out eighty boneless-skinless chicken breasts, retrayed the rib eyes and the pork chops -- rotate the meat, replace the green paper between the layers, restack the cuts on narrow, slide-in aluminum trays, which are notched, edge to edge, into the store-length glass counter -- and collected a shop's worth of trim for cut-down and grinding. I've wiped the blocks with bleach water twice. And I'm doing the least of it.

"Who ordered the tongues?" I say again.

"A doctor," Dennis calls out. He's head-down, working his six-inch blade into a tenderloin, shaving the blade along the broadside, steadily pulling the tissue. Trimming with the grain, they call it. "Some surgeon."

"Why so many?" I can only think: tongue sandwiches. A whole lot of them.

Dennis shrugs. He's got a little kid's haircut, the demeanor of a philosophy professor, and hands glossy with the tiny scars that come with fifteen years of cutting meat. Butcher. "Uses them to demonstrate some new instrument," he says. "I guess they're about the size of a uterus." I can't tell if he's serious. But no one laughs, which, with these guys, may well be another way to break my balls.

And then they point me to the counter, where a woman has edged up to the deli, in front of the ham loaves. The day's first customer. I rinse and towel off my hands, then turn to her.

Butchering is propelled by time. The entire morning is one terrific act of preparation. There are only so many hours to sell, and so many hours to prepare for the selling. The meat never waits. But customers never come into a butcher shop to browse. They are there to buy. There's always something they need, something they must have, or something they don't know about yet. So you give them a little time -- you rinse your hands, you make eye contact, you touch your hat, you show a little focus even as you're moving through the ritual.

It's simple enough: They want answers, and they want meat. A butcher has to have a lot of each. So that's when I lean in, against the solidity of the counter, into the skin of the apron. I've been there long enough to be a guy with some answers, a guy with trusted skills. Butcher.

I ask her, "How can I help you?"

Several Christmases ago, I decided to cook a standing rib roast. I had some dim idea I wanted to make Yorkshire pudding with it. My local supermarket had recently moved its butchers out of the stores to a central processing plant. In order to make my request, the kid behind the meat counter handed me the phone so I could speak directly with the regional manager. I read aloud what I had written at the top of a shopping list, weight and cut. A suggestion, frankly, from Julia Child. I had no idea where it came from in the cow, even how big it would be.

"I can have it out to you in three days," the regional manager said.

"Is there any special way to cook it?" I asked.

There was a long pause, and then I could picture what I was up against, speaking into a gap like that. The guy had what I wanted, he just didn't know what I needed. Maybe he was looking something up for me on the Internet, a recipe or a tip. More likely he was looking out his window at a dumpster in the parking lot. The pause made me quit it. I needed someone with a little knowledge.

I live in a small town where the butchers have mostly folded up their tents. So that day, I drove into the city, to an old-timey shop a friend had told me about called Kincaid's. It was, he said, the best butcher shop in America. Or the last. Worth the drive, he said. Nested in a residential neighborhood soggy with old trees on the north side of Indianapolis, it looked the part -- little storefront, wooden butcher blocks, rolls of white freezer paper hovering in their brackets, handmade signs in the window advertising various pork chops. And big, chockablock guys in aprons, Sharpies tucked in shirt pockets, wrists like baseball bats.

Even a week before Christmas, requesting a rib roast in a joint like Kincaid's didn't make anyone blink. And when I asked for help on how to cook it, the owner stepped forward. He was a bag of cement with a bad haircut named Dave, who regarded me with dark eyes, as if uncertain I was paying attention. Butcher. The guy was the physical representation of his job -- muscular, stern, sore, maybe just a little too aware that the world was changing. I deserved his doubt, if that's what this was. I was about to buy a $120 cut of meat, and I had no clue what I was doing.

"First of all, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice meat," he said. Five nices. I remember it like it was a day ago. "Here's the thing. Put your oven on high. Superhigh. All the way. Get it as hot as you can. Then put this in there for ten minutes. That'll seal it right up. Brown the whole outside. That's the only trick. Then go ahead and follow old Julia Child." I asked him about Yorkshire pudding and he reached under the counter, pulled out a handwritten recipe from a pile of Xeroxes. "I like a little more salt than this recipe calls for," he says. "But I'm not a skinny man and I do have some habits." The store bustled, but I'll be damned if he was thinking about anything but my roast, my skills, my meal. He raised his eyebrows, nodded, and told me it would be great.

At a bakery, the bread is finished when they hand it to you. At a grocery store, you assume all the risk once the boxed-up food is in your car. A butcher shop is unlike any other retail venue, because the parties on both sides of the counter are at work on the same process. The butcher is a kind of partner. Somehow the prime rib you serve belongs in equal measure to him as it does to you.

You can ask butchers anything and they will deconstruct your need. Ask for a porterhouse and trust that they will pick through the T-bones to get you a good one. Or ask what a porterhouse is and they will take out a T-bone to explain that if the short-loin portion is a good bit thicker than an inch, it's a porterhouse. Or ask if a porterhouse is what you want in the first place. They'll ask how you're cooking it, what you're serving with it, how much room you have on your cooking surface. They'll find the answer. And whether it's the apron or the smudges of blood or the enormous weight of the counter or the sheer mass of the product, you believe a butcher. He knows.

A man should have a butcher.

I became a Kincaid's loyalist. Year after year, I watched them work the room -- thorough, efficient, a little fussy. They took all orders -- a single burger or a dozen chops -- seriously. They called the women dear and honey but never pissed them off. They called the men sir but still managed to pal around. They looked you in the eye and remembered your last order. Generous in their curiosity and professional in their detachment, they took all comers -- the exacting and the simply curious -- with equal zeal. They knew things, but you had to ask. They were butchers, the last monks of the town square. They had answers.

I want to be a guy with answers. So it was that one day earlier this year, I asked them if I could give it a try.

I showed up wearing a hat, a threadbare T-shirt, some old pants, and a decent pair of sneakers. When I stood at the two little saloon doors that hung between the work area and the back of the shop, Dave looked at me from head to toe.

"Okay," he said. "You look like a butcher. Get in here."

The manager, Shawn, pole-armed and heavy-bellied, with a sheen of sweat on his brow, huffed. Immediately he regarded me with sidelong disdain, leaning against the metal table, his weight on brisket he'd just cut and towel-dried. "I got orders coming in," he said. "I don't have anything for this guy."

It's cool, I wanted to say. I can just watch. But watching a butcher was not the point. Dave understood as much. He pointed to the front of the store, up the narrow passage between the counter and the walk-in, enough room there for one man to stand and another to pass, wrenched sideways. "Just put him on chickens today," Dave said. "Get him used to the knives. Lori can set him up."

So I settled in with Lori, the only female butcher in the shop, a skinny little hardass who knew every price in the store without looking. Butcher. She slid a knife across the block to me. "Always leave your knife closed -- facing the wall -- when you're done," she said. She lay a chicken leg on the block, tugged a handful of skin, then cut it. "You gotta use your judgment about how much to take off, but we ain't here to sell people chicken skin."

I was a cook once, and a dishwasher before that. I've hung Sheetrock and laid roofing. There is a coziness to manual work that I understand. Repetitive tasks -- pulling the gummy viscera from the breast of a chicken, trimming out the little ridge of fat, cutting off ragged edges -- that stuff was some comfort to me that first morning. The knife they gave me was so sharp that it required almost no downward pressure at all. "You just move the knife forward," Lori said. "One move only. And if you drop it, don't try to trap it or break the fall. Just jump back with your hands up. That thing will stick in your foot just as good as it will a boneless-skinless."

During a lull, with Lori in the walk-in dealing with a plastic bucket full of leg quarters, a woman approached the counter. The others were in the back inspecting an order. And I figured: No time like the present. The meat was right there in front of me. How hard could it be?

She was sixty years old, with a Fendi purse on her shoulder and a little piece of paper pinched between her fingers like a baby mouse. I stepped forward.

"I need just a quarter pound of lean ground beef," she said. And before I could tell her, "You got it!" or "Good enough!" -- the phrases I had picked on the drive in as my own personal signature to every transaction -- she kept on. "Lean," she said. "How lean? What's the percentage? Only a quarter pound. I make only one hamburger. Nothing left over. And I need two flank steaks. Not the marinated ones." I glanced left and downward. "What sort of marinade do you use, anyway?" she went on. "I can marinate it myself, can't I? Can you sell me the marinade separately?"

"Okay," I said, looking for a place to start with the work of it, with the litany of questions. She was asking for a quarter pound of ground beef, but I didn't know which side of the hamburger case to reach for. The signs faced the customer. "Okay," I said again.

My first transaction, stymied by a question about hamburger. What did lean mean, anyway? When I couldn't answer, she narrowed her eyes and bore in. "And I want four center-cut, bone-in pork chops. And really, they have to be the same thickness," she said. I nodded and said okay again. "And be sure you chine the bone."

You can't be a butcher unless you know what you're selling, and I'll be damned if I knew what chining the bone meant. There was a piece of paper in my pocket on which I'd inscribed the various cuts, their names in rows as they were in the case. Along the top, it read, Chuck-Rib-Short loin-Sirloin. Below: Round. Shank and brisket, plate and flank. What good was that doing me now? Chining the bone? It sounded like some sex thing, or a music term. I didn't look like a butcher; I looked like a placeholder. A butcher moves in an informed, muscular fashion, slides the cooler doors with authority, plucks the product, an awkward arm's-length away, with some aplomb. I didn't know the first step of that dance. The woman looked left, then threw her head back, glancing at the rear of the store. "Is Shawn here?" she said. Then, blessedly, Lori came up beside me.

"Hello, sweetie. What'll it be today?"

Sweetie! The woman looked at me glassily, recentered on Lori, then went back to the top of her list. "Yes," she breathed, starting again. "I only need a quarter pound of lean ground beef. I make only one hamburger."

Lori moved before the sentence ended. One hand to the cooler door, the other to a piece of wax paper.

"How lean is that?"

"Ninety-three percent," Lori said without breaking stride.

"Is that what I want?"

"Some people like a little more fat." Steady.

The woman looked down into the cooler, placing a finger on her lip. "More fat," she repeated, puzzled. In the weeks to come I grew to understand that once a customer was looking in the case, the sale was in the hands of the butcher. You worked through the order methodically, answered one question at a time, and used the wrapping time to think a little, to write down prices and answer follow-ups. A little cajoling slowed people down. Praising a cut created pauses. The trick was to lay in an undercurrent of military orderliness, a sense that precision was pleasure, without being bossy or abrupt.

"It's just taste," Lori said. "If you don't cook it too long, lean is good, too." She was shoulder deep in the cooler, holding. I saw her foot tapping the linoleum. Too fast for me, the sale was, I could see, too slow for her.

One of them trims chicken, one butterflies pork chops, another trims out a special order of tenderloins. One person to a block, one block per type of meat. The space is tight, but each station is ample. It's a world constantly decorated with signs of the process. A stray thumbprint of blood, a blackening dust of sawed bones, smears of raw fat.

Sometimes Dave stands in the middle of this, wide-legged, proprietary, appearing a little dizzy, and cooks a small piece of lamb or sirloin on a plug-in griddle. It helps with the smell, he says.

There's a skinny kid they call Joe Mack. Sturdy, tanned, sometimes wears a little rope necklace, who favors a golf shirt under his apron and keeps it tucked in. Barely two years in, he takes classes at night. His father is a meat supplier, and maybe for Joe Mack this is a kind of apprenticeship. There is no part of the job he won't do, though he does nothing so well as work the counter, where the women poke into their own small line in front of him. He speaks politely and slowly, he broadens his smile with every answer so it's broadest as he finishes, at which point he bags the meat and offers to carry it to the car. "Meat makes people happy," he says. "Women like it when you don't get in the way of their happiness." Butcher, through and through.

James is thicker, just slightly older, arms dotted with tattoos, all business at the counter, working the front of the store, mostly preparing the expensive cuts. I ask him about the tattoos. "Believe it or not," he tells me, "I was a rocker. I was in a pretty solid band, and this was my part-time job. But this was something I knew I could get better at." He works the knife upward, with the grain. "It's not going to go away," he says. "People always need meat-cutters." Butcher.

Behind the counter is a thirty-foot-long walk-in, with two doors that swing open so slowly that anyone darting in with a tray of chops has to stop and wait. Shawn calls it the million-dollar walk-in, the irreplaceable fridge. It was built in the first Kincaid's family store across town eighty-seven years ago, moved here one cork-lined wall at a time when the store relocated in 1934. "There isn't enough cork left in the world for them to build this again," he said one day while we were standing in the cooler. The temperature is a rock-steady 35 degrees. The humidity is 70 percent, always. This produces a dry cold, and what I came to think of as a bloody air, ideal for the aging of beef. Meat can hang in this freezer for up to ninety days in the aging process. It blackens on the outside, but it does not rot. Temperature and time break down the fibers in the meat as it dries.

At Kincaid's they laugh at the phenomenon of "wet aging," in which meat is vacuum-sealed for days or weeks. "It's bull****," Shawn says.

"The whole key to aging is evaporation," Dave says. "You let dry air pass freely over the meat. That's why the walk-in is so valuable to us. We have a term here for wet aging."

"It's called old meat," Shawn says.

On Tuesdays, they break beef. On Wednesdays, they break lamb. A quartered cow, or half a lamb, pulled clean of hide, flat on the metal tables in back, sawed into sections, then worked into cuts from there. On Thursdays, they concentrate on the specialty cuts. Fridays mostly they get ready for Saturday, because on Saturdays, well, they try to sell everything, so nothing sits until Monday, when they break everything down and start over again. Each of these days requires a different set of implements -- the saw, the fillet knife, the cleaver, the sponge, mop, and towel.

I thought I would get sick of it, or disgusted. I'd sort of held my breath when I went in, expecting large pools of blood, tubs of kidneys, brains lying on a table. But there is nothing grim about working in a butcher shop. Even the sinkful of tongues made sense to me that day. People were using this stuff. And when meat has a use, a purpose, a destination, it doesn't seem like a wasteful cultural indulgence. To a butcher, a filet does not look like a cylinder of dark, wine-red flesh that runs beneath the spine of a cow; it looks like product to be cared for and tended. It looks like someone's dinner. And of course, it looks like money.

There is no waste. Lifting, toting, trimming, tying -- remarkable economy in every step. Lamb trim gets cut for stew meat. Pork trim made into five different types of sausage. Beef trim: hamburger. The chicken bones are sold for soup stock, the beef bones packed for dogs. Ham and pork scraps are mixed with pineapple juice in tubs of mayonnaise for ham loaf. The basic compact: Weight is money.

Even the fat goes to a rendering house for grease and soap, though "there's not even any profit in that part," Dave's wife, Vicki, the store's bookkeeper, told me. "We actually pay for it to be taken away. You just can't throw old meat away. You just--" she turned her head at the thought; no one likes to think about rot. "Well, you just can't."

Everything I touched in the butcher shop was either cold, sharp, or both. Every surface in the freezer, the Cryo-packs, the meat itself: icy cold. My fingers ached, and I labored through some scut work, mashing gelid tubs of ground ham with my hands, making sausage in an ancient steel tub, vacuum-wrapping the frozen homemade meatballs. I stayed away from the counter. The prospect of those rapid-fire orders pretty much terrified me, and one thing I knew was you couldn't show uncertainty. No one likes a butcher who balks. It shakes the gut-level confidence in stewardship. I spent my spare time standing in front of the counter, on the customer side, trying to memorize cuts and prices, preparing for a time when I could flex some muscle.

Mark taught the lessons of the grinder. Twenty-six years in the business, arms like water mains, he was a former pastor who had lived in Alaska for more than a decade. Butcher. The grinder is a four-foot-long tray, tilted toward a hole in one end. You push the day's trimmings into the hole, where it feeds into a sixteen-inch corkscrew blade. Out the other end: hamburger or sausage. One morning, tossing trim onto the tray, he turned on the grinder and said: "Look, the rule is, if you feel anything tug, anything at all, you hit the button and run." He poked the rubber-covered stop button with his thumb. We stood in the walk-in, the compressors humming like a train. "You put your hands in the air and you run," he said, "like a little girl. I'm serious as a sock. This stuff will humble you. Get away from it. You always run away from trouble in a butcher shop."

I liked the knife work, learning to work the heart of the blade -- that section where the knife curves, just where it begins to flatten out -- rather than the tip. I learned not to saw the meat but to cut with a consistent pressure, a single change of direction. Sawing the blade left ragged edges, little pointy stubs of meat, ugly and prone to burning.

I figured I would get cut, and I figured it would be nasty. The knives, marvelously sharp at the start of the day, were sharpened by Lori during the lulls. One morning, while trimming chicken, I asked her if there was a pool on when I would get cut. She looked at me like I had just pissed myself. "Why would there be?"

"It's going to happen, isn't it? Butchers get cut, right?"

She just wouldn't talk, not about cuts. None of the butchers would, not while they worked, and especially not while holding knives. Catch them on a smoke break and they might begrudgingly tell you about the time they watched a guy clip off the top third of his ring finger on the meat saw, or about hunting for the tip of a thumb in a pile of pork fat in order to ice it down so it might be reattached.

Dave will talk about last year, when he got his hand caught in the cuber, a nasty mouthful of steel teeth designed to gnash the fibers and tendons in the toughest meat. He points to the bottom of his fingers, where the hand meets the first digit. "I was in up to here," he says, "and most of my fingers were no better than hamburger. We just unscrewed the fitting and took the whole thing straight into the hospital room. They wanted to pull it apart -- they were wacky. I couldn't let them. Vicki unscrewed it for them with an Allen wrench. To them it looked like a monster. It's an old piece. I didn't want to lose it."

He's left with trenches down his middle fingers, straight up through the nails. He's unable to bend them much, and not without pain. Still, he thinks of himself as lucky. He squeezes them as if they were produce. "I think they set up pretty well," he says. "I can still cut meat -- what choice do I have?"

You aren't a butcher if you can't deal with people. You're just a meat-cutter. Eventually, I made myself work the counter. I spooned out the hamburger: one-pound, four-pound, nine-ounce orders. I stacked and wrapped pork tenderloins for a Moose Lodge cookout. I took an order in French from an angry Quebecois who couldn't understand why we didn't have roulade ready just then. I rang up beef short ribs, after Shawn sawed them down, for a kid from Texas. I displayed T-bones, urged people to look hard at the weak little loin, then held up a porterhouse for comparison. I sold hanger steaks, flank steaks, chateaubriand, told people that a Delmonico was simply a rib eye, and that we had good ones to show them. I parsed out noxiously sticky ground turkey and shaved turkey breast for women toting their children to the swimming pool, and proffered the kids a free bite before I wrapped it. I sold six Kobe steaks to a German guy in for the Indianapolis 500, then up-sold him three buffalo rib eyes just by asking him to take a look at their leanness.

Sales are the punctuating event of a butcher's day. And the butchers themselves were like shape-shifters. In one moment, they shouldered hindquarters into the cooler, as punch-drunk with the weight of the task as any bricklayer, then straightened like attentive librarians the second the bells on the door rang.

They packaged their meats in white freezer wrap and carefully wrote the cut and the prices with a Sharpie, each in his own particular handwriting, a kind of butcher's font, eschewing the bar-coded labels printed at the scales. I was miserable at it before I slowed to concentrate on the letters -- before I realized this was a message that would speak to the customer from the refrigerator hours later, a reminder of the wealth and promise and exactitude of the butcher shop.

Shawn is breaking a beef quarter. I'm piling out the cuts, wiping off the bone dust with a towel and stacking them on a tray. While lamb meat is riddled with fat, which must be trimmed in small upward flicks, sometimes producing no more than a chunk of meat half the size of a cheeseball, beef is more fully assembled and of a piece. The fat has to go, but it comes off the blade in strips that you throw in the trim pile like old neckties.

Shawn presses a finger into the hip joint, looking for a spot to set his saw. He's been cutting meat for thirty years. He claims that I'm of some use now, and we pass the time talking about his life as a boy in Jersey, riding around the city in a car with his aunt, the nun.

"What'd you learn here?" he asks me during a lull. No follow-up. No filler. Butcher. I tell him I don't find myself very disturbed with what I've come across. I'd thought there would be organs, and blood, some hint of a larger misery. "It doesn't seem like a very miserable business," I tell Shawn.

He shrugs. "I ate raw calf brain on a dare once," he says. "That's pretty miserable. Don't do that." He works perilously fast, making one push with the knife every time, never sawing the meat. I can't help but admire it now. "And you gotta remember, this isn't the killing floor." He tilts his head on his huge neck, wipes the tips of his fingers on the breast of his apron, and holds a paw open in a gesture to the whole place. "That is a rough business right there. Right here, we're a long way from slaughter. A shop like ours is an intermediate step. We humanize things a little, help them see the culture of--"

He pauses then. A guy in a baseball cap has approached the counter. "Counter!" Shawn shouts. Mark and Lori converge on the sale. Then he looks back to me. "The culture of meat, I suppose you'd call it," he says. "People don't have time to know everything about meat. That's what we do. And we don't have time to know anything else." Pause. "Counter," he says, softer now. This time he's talking to me.

I rinse my hands, towel off, and approach. I'm dealing with another of these women, the older ones, the ones with the crimped list and the precise order. I've been here a month now, and I've come to see how customers like this are notoriously fair in their expectations. This one is a regular. She likes chicken, boneless and skinless. Two breasts. No more.

She hands me two potatoes, which I put on the scale before she starts her order. I drop them into a paper sack and price it. I don't talk. It feels orderly and smart, for us both, I think. It allows her to think longer, to want the service more.

This one -- well, she's a dame. Her hair is done up smart, her cheeks are rouged, and her jewelry is on the gaudier fringe of elegant. "There you go, dear," I say, placing the potatoes on the counter. "What else can I get you?" I stare straight at her. There is no need to concentrate on anything else. I know what's around me. I think I even know what she wants.

"My son wants a steak," she says, "but I never buy red meat. What do you suggest?"

I hitch my apron and lean forward, elbows out. I need to know a little about her plans. They're grilling, it turns out. They're drinking imported beer. They're eating on her balcony. She smiles telling me about it.

"I'm thinking rib eye," I tell her. "But big men always think that."

She laughs. "My son is big, too," she says.

"Then the eagle has landed," I say. She laughs once more. And I have her. "Rib eye it is," I say. I show her the meat, spread wide on my hand, then wrap it tight like a Christmas present. "Nice meat," I tell her as she pays. "Good choice."

And when she blushes, I ignore it. I'm a butcher. I'm only giving her what she needs.