by Camas Davis
The class took place on a Sunday at Zenger Farm, an urban farm and educational nonprofit at the very eastern edges of Portland’s city boundaries that held summer farming camps for kids, hosted farm-to-table dinners, and offered community-supported shares in all of its produce. In the farmhouse kitchen, there were rickety folding tables for us to work on and a counter with a stove in the middle of it that we covered up with Adam’s oversize cutting board. A regular household fridge had already been filled with the employees’ lunch leftovers, so we would have to use the big coolers that Jo brought to keep all the meat cold.
Eight students had signed up. They varied in age and were about half men and half women. While Jo and Adam greeted everyone in their warm, Southern manner, I busied myself with last-minute details: slicing charcuterie for the end of the evening, counting knives, sanitizing cutting boards.
The three of us introduced ourselves to the students, then we went around the room to find out why they’d each signed up, something we have done at every class since. There was a bike messenger, an IT guy, a lawyer, a product designer, a hunter, a college student, an aspiring farmer or two. Some wanted to eat only meat that came from animals they’d raised themselves. A few just wanted to know how to buy better meat from local sources. A few of them wanted to occasionally start buying whole animals from local farmers and butcher them on their kitchen counters once or twice a year. Everyone wanted to know why bacon tasted so good.
Then we got to work. Again, I felt completely lost watching Adam. What was he doing with that cleaver and that mallet? Why did he cut the ribs and belly like that?
“I cut these pork chops this way,” Adam explained, “because I have a whole-hog plate on my menu and one of the items on the plate is what I call a Flintstone chop, with the entire rib bone attached to the loin chop.” It sounded a little excessive, and very American. It was also the kind of pork chop I might actually like—all that dark, fatty, flavorful rib meat probably made up for the lean, mild-tasting loin.
He showed us how he removes the pelvic bone, or aitchbone, from the back leg, followed by the shank and trotter, then walked us through his process for making a true American country ham. First, he buries the whole ham in salt, sugar, molasses, juniper, black pepper, and sage—adding a generous dash or two of bourbon, of course—and allows it to sit in that cure for two months under refrigeration. When he feels it’s ready, he soaks the leg overnight in water and the next day he hot-smokes it over hickory for twelve hours.
“But for this class, we’re going to break down the hams into separate muscles,” I said. I shared with the students how the Chapolards made their tiny salted, smoked jambons and suggested that this might be a less risky way to start learning about the principles of salting and drying meat.
“Each of these muscles has a different name depending on who you’re talking to,” Jo said. “At my shop, we call this gnarly muscle by the kneecap the baseball roast, but I’ve heard other butchers call it the knuckle.”
“I just call it ham,” Adam said.
The students nodded and pointed and asked questions, wholly absorbed. They wondered aloud if they could get these lesser-known cuts in butcher shops, or from farmers at the farmers’ markets.
“If you start asking for them, I bet you can,” I said.
Once Adam finished his demonstration, we had the students put all the pieces back together again. They mistook the shoulder for the ham, just as I had in France, but mostly they figured it out.
We brought everyone over to one of the low, rickety tables where we’d set the other pig.
“Go slow, ask a lot of questions, try not to cut yourself,” I said. “But if you do, we have Band-Aids.”
The students each picked up a knife and stared at the pig.
“Not all at once, folks. Take turns,” Adam said. “One person take the trotter off. Then the next person removes the hock, and the next person cuts the shoulder primal off of the belly and loin.”
“Remember your butcher’s grip,” Jo said. “Your wrist won’t hurt at the end of the day, and you’ll be more precise.”
Thus far, no one had made a psycho killer joke.
The students learned to guide the ends of their knives through fascia. They sawed through bone. Their cuts were jagged at times, just like my first cuts had been and probably still were. But the chops mostly looked like chops. The gangly roasts would glue themselves back together once they were put in the oven.
I told the students how different this animal looked from the pigs I’d worked on in France. The meat was more pale, a bit soft and watery, with very little fat. I didn’t know enough to be able to tell if this was due to the handling of the pig before slaughter or whether it was the breed or the feed or the age of the pig, or all of the above, but I wanted them to know there was a difference.
“We’re not typically raising pigs for charcuterie in America. We’re raising them for lean-muscle cuts,” I said.
After three hours or so, we’d broken down all the meat together. We poured them wine and passed out charcuterie and the students began to talk to one another, expressing concern over how most meat they ate was raised, wondering out loud how they might buy better meat and who the farmers were who raised that meat.
When the students left, each of them telling me they’d sign up for whatever class was next, we had about three hundred pounds of meat, fat, skin, and bone to wrap. We’d told the students that we’d split it all up as evenly as possible among eight people and have bags ready for them to pick up the next day.
Adam pulled a six-pack of beer out of his bag. “We’ll need this.”
We stayed for another two hours, wrapping each cut of meat in butcher paper, weighing every package, labeling it with a Sharpie, and stamping it with a NOT FOR SALE stamp, which the USDA required. Given the nontraditional nature of our students having cut it themselves, the USDA didn’t want this meat to enter into the commercial food system. It was now deemed unsafe, except for the people going home with it.
“What should I call these, Adam? Loin chops? Rib chops?”
“Flintstones!”
Between setup, cleanup, and the class itself, we’d worked about ten hours, and Jo and I still had to transport all the meat to Pastaworks, where we would split it all up into paper bags for each student and then store it in their walk-in until the students came to pick up their meat.
The learning curve was steep. I had no examples to work from. It would take us many more classes before we decided to use three sides of pig instead of two whole pigs—there would be less meat to contend with that way, and we wouldn’t have to spend as much time splitting them into sides ourselves. After a few years, I’d price the classes such that I could pay assistants to help wrap all the meat during class and could afford to rent a more appropriate kitchen space with a walk-in so that we could easily keep the meat cold.
“Well, gals. That’s it for me,” Adam said. We helped him load up the back of his truck with his cutting board and tools.
“Let’s do it again,” I said.
“I’ll be there, sugar,” Adam said, blowing both of us a kiss.
* * *
—
THE SUN HAD SET by the time Jo and I were ready to load our two big coolers of wrapped meat into the large gray boat of a Suburban that Jo had borrowed from her friends.
“Honey, that was amazing!”
“Really? Was it? It was so much work. And what was up with those pigs?” I asked Jo. “They were so small and pale.”
“That’s what they always look like.”
“We should go check out her farm,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe you are right. I’ll call them and make it happen.”
“Let’s load these coolers.”
We positioned ourselves at either end of one of the coolers and each gripped a handle.
“Ready?” Jo said. �
�One, two, three—go!”
We could barely lift the cooler.
“Let’s try again. One, two, three—lift!”
We picked it up about an inch off the ground and shuffled it about two feet before setting it down again. I started laughing. We hadn’t really thought through how much meat we were putting into one cooler.
“Okay. We can do this,” Jo said, always the enthusiastic cheerleader. “Go!” We lifted and shuffled a few more feet, set it down, and laughed some more, and then did this about ten more times, until we got both coolers into the Suburban.
We parked in the alley behind Pastaworks, and again we pushed and pulled and lifted those coolers, two girls lugging three hundred pounds of hams and shoulder roasts and bellies and stew meat through mud puddles in a dark alleyway. We were out of breath, sweating, laughing, doubling over, tears streaming down our faces.
“This is some serious meat-mafia shit right here,” Jo said. “If my mama could see me now.”
“I don’t think my mama would want to see me now,” I said, still laughing.
“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be doing this with, though,” she said, suddenly serious, wiping the tears from her eyes.
“Me neither.”
I looked at Jo and wondered how I could possibly have made enough right turns in my life to find her there in front of me, lugging this cooler heavy with meat, heavy with our singular and entirely unlikely shared interest. I could not imagine pulling off any of this without her. We had, a month or so before, once again, decided to try to keep things platonic between us, but I wanted to press her against the wall right then and there and kiss her. “Let’s get this done,” I said.
We dragged the coolers through the back door to the kitchen. We split up every package of pork chop, belly, stew meat, and ham among eight bags. All the bones. Rolls of skin. Cubes of fat. I weighed and reweighed the bags.
“Honey, you’re crazy,” Jo said. “No one is going to care if they didn’t get exactly the same as everyone else. They will never know.”
“I care.”
“That’s why I love ya, honey,” she said. “But we’ve been working for twelve hours, so at some point we’re going to have to get these bags in the walk-in and eat some dinner.”
I looked down at the floor. Andrew was expecting me that night. He wanted to celebrate the success of my first class.
“I can’t. I want to. But I can’t.”
“Not even for our first class? You can’t even get a drink with me to celebrate? Jesus Christ, Camas.”
“I already told Andrew I’d meet up with him.”
“He’s not the one dragging whole pigs around in alleyways with you,” she said, trying to look angry instead of hurt. “Why does he get everything and I get nothing?”
“That’s not how I mean it,” I said. “It’s not the same relationship. I can’t give you both the same thing.”
“I’ll see you later.” She walked out of the store and to her car, shaking her head.
THIRTY-ONE
Shortly after pulling off the first Portland Meat Collective class, Jo landed me a job with Pastaworks. Given our mounting tensions, it seemed like a terrible idea to work together, but I needed the money, and besides, it was the kind of job I had secretly longed for during my days as a restaurant reviewer.
Right before things went sideways at the city magazine, Pastaworks had opened up a tiny restaurant, Evoe, in a small space adjoining the store. Kevin Gibson, one of my favorite chefs in town at the time, billed Evoe (the name was from the opening invocation to Bacchus in Virgil’s Aeneid) as an “enlightened European snack bar.” Behind the long, tall wooden table where Kevin did much of his cooking and prep work, he had two burners, a griddle, an oven, and a sink to work with. On the wall behind Kevin, a vast chalkboard listed that week’s plates, sandwiches, snacks, and soups, with wines, cider, and beer to accompany each. No more than eight customers at a time could sit across from Kevin at the table as he worked, with nothing separating him from his customers but jars of house-made pickles, bowls of Meyer lemons, baby artichokes, and fennel, a crock or two filled with wooden spoons, a stack of white plates. If there weren’t seats at the table, customers had about twelve other seats in the whole place to choose from.
Evoe offered everything I would ever want to eat at just about any time of day. The menu reminded me so much of the food we ate at Kate’s. Stinky cheese and charcuterie. Silky scrambled eggs and chanterelles on toast. Hand-cut slices of jamón serrano. Bowls of olives. Spiced almonds. Prosciutto-and-butter sandwiches. A salad of shaved raw delicata squash, toasted pumpkinseeds, fresh sheep’s-milk cheese, and mint. Lamb meatballs and harissa. House-made merguez sweetened with paprika and cinnamon. Crispy duck breast topped with honeyed persimmons and peppery greens. The prices were reasonable, the ingredients simple, the flavors perfect in their purity and complex in their combinations.
I’d written a review of Evoe in the last weeks before losing my magazine job. I was required to visit the place only two or three times to review it, but I visited Evoe twice that. I just couldn’t stay away. It was one of the few restaurants in town that did not trigger cynicism in me. The food felt honest and straightforward, the atmosphere humble, the room bright, light, and welcoming. I remember thinking how great it would be to work there.
That’s the job Jo got me. Evoe needed someone two or three days a week to tend to customers and help prep and cook. It had been nearly two decades since I worked in a restaurant, and when I had, it was as a short-order cook on the line of a greasy hippie diner in Eugene and as a lowly sandwich maker at a surly East Coast deli. But Jo had introduced me to Peter, the owner of Pastaworks, to discuss using their space to occasionally store meat for our classes, so he knew who I was. At Jo’s urging, I wrote and asked him to take a chance on me, playing up my food-writing background, my experience testing recipes. Kevin occasionally brought in whole animals, and he used meat from the butcher counter where Jo worked, so I also emphasized my recent studies in France and my continued studies through the Portland Meat Collective.
“Can you meet this Friday?” Peter wrote back.
I did an on-the-job tryout for one day, taking orders from customers, pouring wine, helping Kevin assemble sandwiches and peel potatoes for the next day’s tortilla española. The job required me to do a little bit of everything—I washed dishes, scrambled eggs, took orders, filled people’s water glasses, and boiled brine for pickles in between. I liked the idea of adding these tasks to the odd mix of work I’d already thrown together for myself: bookkeeping for my brother, writing when an interesting story assignment arose, organizing butchery classes. I stood. I sat. I cooked. I typed. I wrote. I did math. I dragged a knife along the curve of bone. I lugged three hundred pounds of meat down dark alleyways. I talked with strangers. I marketed. I spoke to the media. Among all of these tasks, I was utilizing every part of my brain and body.
“When are you going to get a real job?” my mom kept asking me.
“I like what I’m doing now,” I told her. “I’m happy.”
Of course, cobbling together so many different low-paying jobs didn’t put me in the greatest financial position. Yet this stitching together of various jobs at their ragged seams felt like exactly what I needed to be doing.
* * *
—
KEVIN WAS A QUIET MAN, hard to read, prone to mood swings, but he was kind and patient with me. And because I was prone to mood swings myself, I had an easy time spotting his from a long way off. He knew I had a good knowledge base about food, but I still had to prove that my taste buds worked just as well behind the counter as they did as a diner at the table.
Kevin approached his ingredients thoughtfully, with an eye toward minimalism. “Rare, meditative precision” was the phrase I’d used in my review, but perhaps this had conjured the wrong image of him for my readers. His food was precise, but n
ot in an overly fussy way. He wasn’t meditative in the Zen-master sense of the word—in fact, I sensed he was a haunted man, and that the only way to keep from completely succumbing to the haunting was to cook himself as far away from whatever haunted him as possible. This, I often thought, was the best kind of cooking—cooking that saves your life.
“You did good,” Kevin said at the end of my tryout as we counted our tips. Tips! I hadn’t held that much cash in my hand for a long time. I felt rich.
“Not bad for a restaurant reviewer, eh? It feels funny to be on the other side now,” I said. “I think I like it much better.”
Writing about restaurants had required me to understand not only what an ingredient was, but what the chef had hoped to make it do. Now I not only had to understand what we wanted an ingredient to do, but I needed to help make it happen. I needed those scrambled eggs with chanterelles to be silky and soft, the chanterelles to be caramelized but still possess bite. It was one thing to say this about a dish, and another thing entirely to make it happen.
Kevin poured us two glasses of bright, effervescent Txakoli from Spain.
“So next time you come in, I’ll teach you how to massage an octopus. Also, I have ducks, so let’s make some of that duck prosciutto you told me about.”
I’d landed my first restaurant job in fifteen years. I’d gone from managing editor of a magazine to water-pouring, dishwashing, scrambled-egg-making, marcona-almond-spicing, bus-tub-carting workhorse for one of Portland’s most understated, talented chefs. I was even serving food to many of the chefs whose restaurants I’d once reviewed, along with other food critics in the city. I cared not one bit how it sounded or looked. I’d get a “real job” later. Or maybe never.