by Camas Davis
I watched as Dominique gracefully flicked the very tip of his knife into the space between the muscle and the length of vertebrae that the muscle adhered to.
“I liberate the muscle like this,” Dominique said. Not butchering. Not cutting. Liberating.
Kate walked into the cutting room just then, dressed in a white butcher’s coat, hairnet, and boots.
“Bonjour!” she sang out, filling the room with her big presence.
“Bonjour!” everyone sang back. Knives down, six sets of kisses from each of us on each of her cheeks, six sets of ça vas and ça va biens.
“Oh, good. He just started,” she said. “How are you doing?”
“I’m so happy you’re here,” I said. “I have so many questions.”
The filet was covered in lumpy fat, glands, and sinew, and once Dominique had liberated it completely, he began trimming all of that away, until the tenderloin became a pale red tube of meat, a few inches in diameter and maybe a foot long.
I asked Kate about filet mignon.
In France, she told me, filet mignon most often referred to pork tenderloin, while filet de boeuf or filet mignon de boeuf referred to beef tenderloin. How Americans had come to use filet mignon for beef, she couldn’t say.
When the Chapolards didn’t sell out of their tenderloins, Kate said, they turned them into filet sec, salted and dried tenderloins, which they sold for nearly double the price of fresh tenderloin. Given the popularity of tenderloin back in the States, I found it surprising that they would ever not sell out of fresh tenderloins.
“Is tenderloin considered fancy here like it is in the States?” I asked Kate.
“Yes, especially at restaurants. I’ve always wondered, though, why I see a lot of grandmothers buying small amounts at the Chapolards’ stall,” Kate told me. “Maybe because they are fancy grandmothers,” she laughed, “but it may be because tenderloin doesn’t require a lot of chewing and isn’t too strong in flavor.”
Wasn’t flavor what everyone was in search of? Why would we pay more money for a cut of meat that wasn’t very strong in flavor? How was it that tenderloin could simultaneously be the favorite of French grandmothers with fragile teeth and sensitive taste buds and a symbol of rich American businessmen in power suits?
Dominique set the filet mignon aside and moved on, this time to the back leg, the jambon.
“Now I liberate the ’am,” Dominique said, rendering the h in ham silent. As he said this, he pointed to his own butt and thigh. Then he placed the edge of his knife between two of the pig’s vertebrae, near where the spine curved up toward the pig’s tail, cut straight down, then ever so slightly to the left, moving his blade through some kind of cartilage, before slicing straight down again, all in one graceful motion. He lifted the entire back leg up off the table, hock and trotter still attached.
“Et voilà! Jambon!” he proclaimed, wide-eyed, with a look of wonder on his face that he had not had when he cut the filet mignon.
* * *
—
DOMINIQUE DISAPPEARED INTO the walk-in with his ham. When he returned, he lightly carved a line right underneath the outer edge of the ribs with the very tip of his knife.
“He’s about to take off the ribs and spine in one piece. He’ll use his knife to peel the bone off of the belly, loin, and shoulder.”
Dominique gently ran his knife, over and over again, underneath the ribs that sat on top of the belly, following the same line he’d created before, finding the natural seam that lay there, a topographic anatomical road map. He used his non–knife hand to push the plate of ribs away from him so that he could see where his knife was going. With just a half-dozen strokes, Dominique liberated all of the ribs from the belly to the point where the ribs met vertebral column and loin.
Dominique spoke in French.
“You should think of this bone structure like a key,” Kate translated. “He’s released the ribs from the belly, but until he releases the ribs that sit on top of the shoulder, and until he releases the chain of vertebrae that the ribs are attached to, you can’t turn the key.”
Dominique guided his knife underneath the ribs that sat atop the shoulder and then curved along the side of each vertebra, careful not to poke his knife into the loin, where, Kate told me, pork chops and roasts came from.
“Now I open it like a book,” Dominique said.
With his non–knife hand, he opened the rib cage away from the pig’s body in the same motion one might use to open a book, as if the ribs were the pages and the vertebrae the book’s spine.
“It’s so beautiful,” I said, marveling not only at Dominique’s graceful movements but also the splendid curvature of those bones.
Kate explained that the Chapolards would cleave the ribs, which had very little meat on them, since Dominique had left most of the meat on the belly, into manageable pieces, and people would buy them to make stock, soup, or stew. The French weren’t into ribs like Americans were.
“With these bones removed, he can easily see where the shoulder and the loin run into each other and retrieve the entire loin muscle. Aside from what they use for paupiettes and boudin blanc, he’ll keep the loin muscle whole for the market, and people can ask him to cut whatever size loin roast they want. On the other side of the pig, they’ll leave the ribs and spine on and turn the loin into bone-in pork chops.”
Dominique pointed to the top of the shoulder, where the ribs and vertebrae used to be.
This cut was commonly called the coppa in Italy, Kate explained, a term the French had adopted, although Dominique sometimes also referred to that area of the shoulder as the échine. Dominique motioned for me to examine the structure of the coppa. It wasn’t one muscle, but rather a bundle of small, elongated muscles connected by a star of intermuscular fat running between them.
“This is a very flavorful cut, because all those muscles worked very hard and all that fat provides flavor,” Kate said, explaining that the Chapolards salted and dried the coppa whole and sold thin slices of it for a high price. The rest of the shoulder they’d use for sausage, brochettes, and pâté. To remove the coppa, Dominique carved a straight line with his knife, starting at the exact spot where the darker-colored coppa met the lighter-colored loin and ending down toward the hock and trotter. Then he used his knife to peel the loin muscle that ran along the pig’s back away from a thick layer of fatback and skin and held the lean, tubular muscle up for me to see. It was about as long as my legs and almost as thick as the diameter of my head. Dominique pointed to the area on either side of his spine and said, “Longe.” Loin.
As Dominique pointed to the muscles of his body, I became more aware of my own. Butt, thighs, calves. I use them for walking, for running, for sitting, for squatting. I use them nearly all the time, as does a pig, at least one that is allowed to move around. What about the loin—the backstrap, as hunters often call it—the long muscles that run along each side of my spine and hold me upright—do they hold a four-legged animal up in the same way? Not quite. Did how these muscles on a pig move have something to do with the pale color of the loin and the darker hue of the coppa, with why we cook a pork chop in a frying pan and a pork shoulder in a smoker or a Crock-Pot? I realized that this was the first time in my thirty-two years of eating (and not eating) meat that I had ever given much thought to the intricacies of a pig’s anatomy in relation to my own.
“So that is the first step in butchery,” Kate said.
“That’s only the first step?”
“In the United States, this is what they call cutting primals,” Kate said. The shoulder, the back leg, the belly, and the loin were considered the four main primals. There was also le cinq, the fifth quarter, as Kate called it: the head, the hocks, the trotters, the tail, and all of the offal, much of which went into the Chapolards’ pâté de tête and boudin noir.
* * *
—
THI
S WAS ALL PRIMAL, I thought. A man, a knife, a pig.
Michael Pollan, in Cooked, writes, “In ancient Greece, the word for ‘cook,’ ‘butcher,’ and ‘priest’ was the same—mageiros—and the word shared an etymological root with ‘magic.’” Pollan also posits that a mageiro, in ancient Greece, referred to a man—it could only be a man back then—who was hired to kill animals for sacrifice and then roast them for sacrificial public gatherings. In this sense, he was a priest, a gatekeeper between animal, human, and gods, and he was a cook, charged with feeding the public with fire-roasted meats. His tasks also extended to selling whatever meat was left after the feast, so he became a butcher, too. It seemed to me that the mageiro had to possess a great deal of respect and reverence to ensure that one of his roles did not overtake the others. The way we produce, handle, and consume meat today is very much the opposite of that. Respect and reverence are almost entirely missing from the equation.
Watching Dominique made me feel a part of something bigger, something full of respect and, yes, maybe even sacred. Underneath this feeling, the stories I had told myself about my relationship to the animals I ate began to smell bitter and more than a little burned.
THIRTEEN
Back at Kate’s, there were beds to be made, dishes to be washed. Then her students called to say their flights were canceled and they’d be a few days late. This gave Kate, Jonathan, and me an opportunity to figure out how we would hang shelves on the extremely uneven walls of the piggery the next day. After we hatched some half-baked plans, Kate and Jonathan made us what Kate called a grand aioli for dinner, a gorgeous, Provençal-inspired spread of poached carrots, beans, and potatoes along with perfectly soft-boiled eggs from Kate’s chickens, their yolks a vibrant burnt-yellow; bright-orange langoustines boiled to tender perfection; and a homemade aioli spiked with garlic and garden herbs for dipping it all into.
When the post-dinner Gascon lull began to settle into my head and feet, I found my hammock for the evening and brought with me a small glass of Armagnac and a copy of John Berger’s Pig Earth, his 1979 paean to the last surviving vestiges of French peasant culture in the twentieth century, a book he wrote after abandoning his city life for the French countryside, just as I had decided, at least temporarily, to do.
In the book’s introduction, Berger describes peasants as “those who work on the land to produce food to feed themselves” but who are “forced to feed others first, often at the price of going hungry themselves. They see the grain in the fields which they have worked and harvested—on their own land or on the landowner’s—being taken away to feed others, or to be sold for the profit of others.”
The nature of the Chapolards’ work had a strong whiff of peasantry—the work of producing food was steady and consistent, based, to some extent, on the seasons—but it seemed to me that the Chapolards had also managed a modern-day workaround. They were selling the food they raised to others, sure, but no one else but the Chapolards appeared to profit directly from those sales—save for the tax bureau, a certain kind of politician might point out. They were intimately involved in every part of the process of getting their product to market, but that product also filled their own tables. The Chapolards were not going hungry—far from it. To achieve this total ownership, they had to work together as a family, and they had to work hard, but none of this came at the cost of their own well-being, at least not so far as I could tell. It was as if they had managed to preserve the fulfilling parts of peasant life—constantly working to feed themselves and, one might argue, their community—and to bypass the parts that no one should rightly be nostalgic about: exploitation by others or, worse, exploitation of one another.
Working in the cutting room was cold, serious, efficient work, but I hadn’t yet detected the sort of dead-eyed monotony one might assume would result from this sort of repetition over time. On the contrary, each day I spent in the cutting room, I witnessed a sustained alertness in the eyes of each of the Chapolards, even if their eyes also expressed tiredness. It seemed to me that this sort of sustained energy could only be the result of pride in one’s work, and that that pride might have something to do with their particular mode of ownership of the production process.
“Recently the insulation of the citizen has become so total that it has become suffocating,” John Berger wrote. “He lives alone in a serviced limbo—hence his newly awakened, but necessarily naïve, interest in the countryside.”
Berger wrote this in 1979, but, reading it, I felt like he was talking about me. Born in 1976, perhaps I was the progeny of that 1979 nostalgia. I most likely was romanticizing the Chapolards’ way of life and work, but perhaps my romantic projection came out of a longing for purpose and meaning amid my own serviced life back home. I had a hunch that Pig Earth represented Berger’s own attempt to reconcile a similar nostalgic longing.
* * *
—
A FEW WEEKS LATER, over lunch one day, I decided to don my old magazine editor’s hat for an hour, convinced Kate and a few of her students who spoke French to translate for me, and began peppering Dominique and Christiane with questions. Did they think someone like me who came to study with them was just consumed by useless romanticism?
Christiane responded first by reiterating that they worked hard every day, and that she liked best those visitors to the cutting room who were willing to pick up a knife and work hard like them. But she also said that she thought maybe some people didn’t realize how much their family had struggled in the beginning to figure out how to work together. They’d even hired a psychologist at one point to help the brothers and their wives figure out how to cooperate, negotiate, and still get along at the end of the day.
When talking about the importance of working together, Dominique often liked to say, “Tout seul, tu meurs”—in other words, alone, you die. But that didn’t make working together any easier, Christiane said.
Then Kate explained something I hadn’t understood at first. Not only had the Chapolard brothers and their wives formed a Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun (GAEC)—a kind of legally recognized business status that was first created and recognized in France in 1962 to support and sustain the family farm model and prevent rural exodus—by obligating family members to formally and legally share in the liabilities, risks, and rewards of running their operation together. They also took part in a Coopérative d’Utilisation de Matériel Agricole (CUMA), which translates loosely as “a cooperative for the use of farm equipment.” Taking part in a CUMA meant that the Chapolards shared the cost and use of farm equipment with other local farmers so that no one farmer had to share the financial burden of such investments. It was this same principle of shared resources and risk that allowed the Chapolards to team up with other farmers and cooperatively take over the abattoir in Condom.
Dominique called their particular method of cooperation and vertically integrated production “short-circuit farming.” Kate, on the other hand, often called it “full-circle farming.” Growing their own feed controlled grain prices, and transforming the meat themselves into value-added products like sausage and jambon meant the profits stayed with the family. Forming a GAEC and joining a CUMA meant the individual costs and risks of starting and running such a farm were kept to a minimum, and it allowed them to remain part of a community of farmers they could learn from.
This wasn’t a choice that most farmers in France made, but Dominique explained that it had been part of what appealed to him when he decided, at the age of forty-four, to quit his job as an administrator at a forestry school and start working with his brothers on the farm. He wanted to prove that small-scale family farmers could succeed, but only if farmers supported one another, and only if they lived in a community that was willing to support them with their pocketbooks. The meat the Chapolards sold never traveled farther than fifteen miles from their farm, and they sold every part of their animals—to a population of fewer than ten thousand people.
He then explained just how much work and time goes into their process. It takes six to eight months from the time they sow the grain seeds in the spring to when they harvest the grain and feed it to their pigs in the fall. From breeding to farrowing to weaning to fattening to slaughter, another sixteen months passes. They spend every week in the cutting room working on eight to ten pigs at a time, each weighing an average of almost four hundred pounds at slaughter. Their charcuterie takes four to eight weeks of curing and drying. They spend four days a week at the markets. Add all of this up and their seed-to-sausage process represents over two years of investment before they receive the nine euros per kilo, on average—roughly five dollars per pound—that they charge today for their products.
Christiane chimed in again. “This isn’t a hippie thing,” she said. “This isn’t a back-to-the-land, peace-and-love ideal. We work hard and we own what we do. But nothing is permanent. We allow ourselves moments of pleasure and joy because our life is day by day and we don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow.”