Cleaving

by Julie Powell

  “At what temperature?” Pop-quiz style, he asks.

  “Three hundred.”

  “And what do you want the thermometer to read?”

  “One forty?”

  Aaron cocks his head and just stares at me for a moment, going, “Aaaahhhh…” I know by now—well, I’m pretty sure—that this is his “tweaking” noise, what he does when he’s thinking about adjustments. Or then again he could be lightly chastising me for having remembered wrong. Which would be annoying but not unlikely, as he’s always tweaking. It can be hard to keep up with the changes. “Let’s try for one thirty. It’s going to continue to cook after it’s come out of the oven, as it rests.”

  “ ‘You’re like a textbook with arms. I know this.’ ”

  “What?”

  “It’s from Buff—. Nothing. Just riffing, sorry.”

  “Don’t forget to baste. We want all those juices from the marrow to soak into the meat.”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay. So now.” He slaps the ribs onto the table. “Now you’re going to practice for your Christmas crown roast bonanza. You’re going to make what’s called a ‘half crown.’ Usually with a crown roast, you use both racks of ribs, but this time you’ll just use one.”

  (“Racks of ribs”—yet another of the many unbearably euphemistic terms in butchery, suggesting that the bloody cage that once held in this dainty creature’s innards can be transformed into a neat something to hang your hat on.)

  “I’ll talk you through it.” He pushes the ribs toward me. “You’re going to separate out the ribs. Band saw.”

  First he shows me how to chine the rack, using the rotating blade to shave off the chunky edge of the spine, get rid of excess bone. Then he tells me to lay the rack out flat, resting on the broad curve of the ribs, hold one end of the rack firmly in each hand, and run the blade just into the vertebrae at the junctures between the ribs, without cutting too much into the eyes of the chops. I don’t worry about standing in front of the blade anymore, don’t think about cutting off my hand or sending a bone flying into someone’s face. Well, not too much. Respect the band saw, after all. Within a minute or less I’ve got it done. The rack is still in one piece, but the backbone has been split between each rib, which makes the whole long piece as flexible as an accordion.

  “Now you’re going to French the ends of the rib bones.”

  I do not look cross-eyed at Aaron when he says this, because I know that he doesn’t mean that kind of Frenching. “Frenching,” to butchers, is the action of cleaning and exposing the bones of a rib roast, which will, in the end, stick up from the bound meat in a proud circle. Aaron demonstrates with the first rib. He begins by scoring all four sides of the bone with a knife; the tough film adhering bone to flesh has to be compromised. From the place he’s scored to the end of the rib, he slices through the meat on either side. Then, where the rib has been scored, he loops around a length of twine, up through the intercostal meat, and ties it with a butcher’s knot. Cinches it tight, then wraps the string around his palm a couple of times and pulls sharply toward himself, along the length of the bone. All that meat comes off in a clump, leaving the bone perfectly smooth and dry. “Simple.” He scoops up the meat scraps and throws them into a lugger of lamb meat that will go into Juan’s second batch of sausages. “Now you try.”

  All doesn’t go quite so easily for me. I score the bone, make slices in the meat, get the twine up tight around the rib, yank and yank. Still the string hangs up on those stubborn gobbets. What’s more, each time I yank, the string pulls tighter around my hand and digs in, cutting two furrows, at the base of my pinky and in the meat of my thumb. These are soon oozing blood. I’ll be damned if I’m going to say anything about it, but it does hurt, and I know I’m hesitating, afraid of hurting myself more.

  And then I break the string. “Shit,” I mutter, I hope too quietly for Aaron to hear. He’s now a few feet away, leaving me to my own devices. I pull off the string embedded in the flesh of my hand, snip the now-impotent circle of twine from the meaty rib, then walk as quickly as I inconspicuously can, and grab a couple of Band-Aids, which I slap on. On my way back to the table I reach into a bin below the counter and find a cutting glove. We rarely use these bulky things in the shop (if a bit of latex gets in the way of your cutting skills, imagine what a thick layer of braided stainless steel will do), but now I pull on the glove and set out to try again. Aaron has noticed my brief absence, or heard my cursing, or has just espied my glove. He doesn’t say anything, but now he’s watching. Making me nervous.

  I knot another length of string around the rib. I yank. Nothing. “Dammit.”

  “Use inertia. Start with the string stretched away from you. Then give it one hard pull toward you, along the line of the bone. Like this.” He takes the twine from me.

  “I can do—”

  “Calm down. I’m not going to do it. I’m just going to show you.” With the string gripped in his fist he pantomimes the motion, starting with his arm straight out, past the far edge of the rack. Then, slowly, he moves his arm in, elbow into his side. “But instead of pulling the string just horizontally, pull it up a little so that you’re pulling the string right along the upward curve of the rib. Otherwise, you’re fighting the bone as well as the meat. That’s why the twine breaks.”

  “Ah. Okay. I get it.” I grab the string back from him. Yank.

  Yank.

  Yank.

  On the fourth try, the meat finally comes away. And the Frenched bone is perfect, white and bare. I did it!

  “Oh my God.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything so satisfying in my entire life.”

  “Let’s not get carried away.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I can think of one or two things. But with my clothes on? In a butcher shop? This is pretty much it.”

  Well, it never gets that good again. The next bone is too thick for the twine technique. The string snaps once, twice, three times a lady.

  Josh waits until Aaron’s gone back into the kitchen, then says, “Don’t listen to that dumb-ass. Just use your knife like everybody else in the world does.” And so the rest of the rack I clean the dull, slow way, scraping, scraping, struggling not entirely successfully to get off every last shred. It’s not glamorous. But when I stand the rack on its end, bend it into a circle, and tie it tight with another skin-biting pull of the twine, like a tug at a Southern belle’s corset, the crown roast is a thing of beauty, emphatically female. “Eye candy,” Aaron calls it, setting it in the case. It looks rather sluttish there, nestled amid the more pedestrian pork chops; I feel almost as exposed as a Frenched bone, just looking at it, as if anyone walking in could reach certain conclusions about the person who made it.

  “Jules, you been basting?”

  “Shit. Right. Sorry.”

  I want to see who winds up buying my sexy little she-roast, but when it goes I’m in the back, scooping marrow out of the bones that until moments ago had served as the rack for the roast beef, and spreading it on toast.

  “HEY. HOW’S the meat?”

  “It’s good. I’m freaking exhausted. Driving home—I mean, to Rifton. My connection might cut out here in a minute.”

  “Okay. I miss you.”

  “I miss you too.”

  During our separation, when I had my Yorkville sublet, I made it my own. Bought a brightly colored futon, a new big-screen television. Brought a couple of plates, a few pots and pans, from Queens. My kitchen was tiny, tinier even than the one in which I’d cooked through five hundred and twenty-four Julia Child recipes a couple of years before. Which is saying something. But I didn’t mind, because it was mine. I had two small windows that looked out into the ailanthus-green row of overgrown garden patches that filled the center of the town-house-lined block. I could look into other people’s windows, watch the woman who meticulously made her bed in bra and slip every morning, the more erratic goings-on of a family of fo
ur in their breakfast nook. I had snapshots of Eric, the pets, my family, that one my father took so long ago of D, small reminders of my history and my connections to the world. But the tiny apartment was just for me.

  Eric didn’t have that. Eric had our old, hideous apartment, which in my four-month absence quickly acquired a male mustiness. Overripe bananas languished, not only in the kitchen, but also on side tables and in his briefcase. Kitty litter got ground into the rugs. A crack mysteriously appeared in the picture window in the living room—not the spiderweb left by a piece of gravel kicked up by a semi rumbling down Jackson Avenue, but rather a long, straight fissure right down the center of the pane. It ran along the same axis as a ridge in the linoleum floor stretching the length of the loft; a flaw in the foundation, we guessed, perhaps also responsible for the unnerving way that the stairs down to the street seemed to be pulling apart, gaping at the juncture of the risers.

  I’m holding my phone to my ear as I talk to Eric, in defiance of legality and driver safety. “You got plans tonight?”

  “You know. Clean the house. Beer. Battlestar Galactica. What about you? You having dinner with Josh and Jess?”

  “Nuh-uh. Steak. Wine. Sleep.”

  Worse than the detritus and the disrepair, though, for Eric, was the inescapable flood of memory. We have always been pack rats, both of us, and we’ve lived together for ten years. Our apartment is crammed to the gills with all the stuff of our lives. Books and photo albums and furniture and art and more books. He couldn’t get away from it. While I sat serenely in my monk’s cell, he was in a place with no spot for his eyes to rest on that didn’t remind him of what it was that was cracking apart.

  “Can you hear me now, honey?”

  “Barely… You’re cutting out.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to call you later tonight.”

  “Okay, babe. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  And now I’m doing it to him again. We are not separated, technically. But I’m still running away.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you t—” And the connection is lost.

  CHRISTMAS IS just a few days away now. The plan is to meet at the shop in the afternoon—my parents and brother in one rental car driven up from JFK, Eric in another with Robert the Dog. I’ll give them the big tour of the shop. Then, taking off together in our three cars like a flock of fossil-fuel-guzzling geese, we will head back to their rental cottage. We’ll be together, and I will cook with my mother and wrap presents with Eric on the floor of my apartment and play-wrestle with my brother and do the crossword with my dad and rub my dog’s belly, and we will decorate a tree, and I will let myself be part of a family again.

  Until then, I wallow in my solitariness. I don’t do constructive things with it. Sometimes I simply stare out the windows. Or indulge in crying jags. I resort to a bit of stalking, which I convince myself, as stalkers probably always do, is actually charming and, ultimately, irresistible. The scarf I’ve been holding onto for nearly a month now, I pack in a box. I buy a large candy cane and attach to it a piece of white cloth, meant—adorably, I think—to resemble a flag of truce or surrender. I contemplate with all seriousness, as if there were a rational choice, where to mail this little care package. D’s work? His apartment? His mother’s house? I wind up reasoning—as absurd as the word reason might seem, applied here—that the last choice makes the most sense. I mail it to Massachusetts from the tiny Rifton post office on my way to work one morning. Swallow a lurch of shame and fear, and also of wild hope and anticipation, as it leaves my hands.

  Josh and Jessica, being Jewish, don’t go in so much for all the Christmas hoopla, and they insist that Thanksgiving is a much bigger day for them, businesswise. Still, after a bit of a lull between holidays, things are picking up.

  Josh, with major assists from Aaron, Juan, and Tom, is constantly working to perfect his pâté and chopped liver and double-smoked bacon, his roast turkey and smoked pork chops, and an endless array of sausages—bratwurst, sweet Italian, chorizo, merguez, chicken Thai. Each batch a little different until he gets it right. With Colin, the enormous redheaded CIA grad and ex-navy guy who Josh has recently hired as an extra cutter—and with whom I have instantly bonded over our shared love of Willie Nelson and Hank Williams III—I have cleaned out a closet in the back. We’ve hung dowels, and now sausages dry there, fat salamis and skinny “jerky sticks,” always some new experiment. And they are all snapped up by customers, especially now, during the season of cocktail parties. I roll eye rounds in seasoning and pack them in rock salt, then take them out a week later, brown and dry. I brush off the salt and tie them the way Tom has shown me, with one long piece of butcher’s twine, ending with a loop on the end. They go in the curing closet, from whence they’ll eventually emerge as bresaola. I taste liverwurst with a spoon, straight from the chopper that Josh is so proud of, a big steel bowl on a rolling stand, with blades like a circular fan, only terrifyingly sharp. They turn meat to a sticky pink puree in a matter of seconds. We ponder whether the liverwurst needs more salt. We decide yes.

  JOSH’S LIVERWURST

  Josh, of course, makes his liverwurst in vast quantities, but if you have a food processor you can replicate it on a smaller scale, about three pounds’ worth, at home.

  1 pound pork liver, cut into several pieces

  2 pounds pork belly, cut into several pieces

  ½ teaspoon marjoram

  ½ teaspoon sage

  ½ teaspoon white pepper

  ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

  ¼ teaspoon ground ginger

  4 tablespoons finely chopped onion

  Pinch onion flakes

  2 teaspoons salt

  Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lay out the pork liver and belly on a roasting pan and cook in the oven until the meat and offal are rare to medium rare—the liver should still ooze just a bit of blood, the meat should be cooked through but still good and pink, the juices not entirely clear. Let cool just slightly, perhaps five minutes.

  Place the belly meat and liver in the food processor along with all the remaining ingredients. Puree on high speed until the mixture is completely smooth, stopping now and then to scrape down the sides of the food processor.

  Let come to room temperature, then cover and chill.

  I break down whole lambs. I take off the heads first (Juan will sometimes take one home with him; someday I need to ask what he does with them). Then the back legs come off the creatures (and they are very much still creatures, skinned and cleaned and with their feet cut off, but utterly recognizable). To do this I simply balance them on their backs with their rear legs sticking out past the edge of the table. I slice through from the edge of the slit belly down to the backbone, just above the hip on either side. Then, reaching into the cavity, I press down on the backbone, anchoring it to the table, while with my other hand I grab the lamb’s ankles or whatever you call them on a lamb and pull sharply down, splitting the backbone with a satisfying crack.

  Occasionally Josh waltzes with a lamb. Its head back, eyes lidless, looking like a ghoulish debutante in a hideous swoon.

  I cut and cut and cut. Rounds, shoulders, ribs, loins. I bone out hams and peel out skirts and break through joints and cut, cut, cut. Hours at the table, on my feet. My back gets sore, my eyes blear. My fingers freeze. And my wrist. My wrist.

  “Julie, have you eaten lunch?”

  “Not really hungry.”

  “Julie, would you take a fucking break already?”

  “I’m good.”

  Josh finally puts his foot down. He stands in front of me and whispers. “Julie. Put the motherfucking knife down, or I’m not letting you near the table again.” Then a roar: “Eat a damn sandwich!”

  So I reluctantly take off my apron and hat, pick up one of the sandwiches Josh has brought in a big white bag from the deli next door. (Josh is constantly buying lunch for his employees—sandwiches or Chinese food or barbecue. That is when he isn’t corralling Aaron into cooking a “family
meal.” I find it so far above and beyond as to make me somewhat uncomfortable, like when he gives me piles of meat and refuses to let me pay. For what he’s allowing me, I should be buying him lunch.) I sit at the battered round table in the rear of the shop, unwrap my lunch, and munch halfheartedly, drinking from a huge plastic glass of water. I’ve not had any all day, and realize, once I stop for air, that I’m parched. I also realize that every bit of me aches. I feel like I could close my eyes and sleep here in this straight-backed chair. It is such a shame that I don’t feel like this at night in my lonely room.

  Aaron plops down in another seat. In addition to his sandwich, he has some chicken soup he’s ladled up from the big pot burbling away on the stove.

  “How you doing, Jules? Got the thousand-yard stare going there.”

  I know it. I can feel the strange intensity with which I’m poring over a tile of linoleum a few feet away. “Ehn.” I chew slowly.

  “It’s only three thirty! We got miles to go!”

  “I know, I know. I’ll be fine. I am fine. God, this sandwich is good.”

  “What kind did you get?”

  “No idea.” I look down at my sandwich, stare at it for an inordinately long while. Time feels like taffy. I can hear that my conversation is strange, pocked with odd pauses. “Something white. Turkey.”

  “Yeah, that reminds me, we gotta bone out those turkeys. They’ve been thawing in the cooler a few days. Should be unfrozen.”

  “Boning out turkeys, huh? Sounds…” I try to come up with the word. “Hard.”

  “Every day you learn something new.” He rises to get seconds on soup. The black-and-white of his chef’s checks make my eyeballs quiver a little in their sockets as he walks by. When he comes back, as he sits down he says, “And tomorrow we make your crown roast.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Cool.”

  “Hey, Aaron, can I take my break now?” Jesse is ambling back from the counter, his fingers already reaching to his waist for his apron strings.

  “Give me five minutes, Jesse.” Aaron dumps his dishes in the kitchen sink, then strides to the back door. He’ll now roll himself a cigarette and sit on the metal back stairs in the brick alley behind the store to smoke it. “Three minutes.”