by Julie Powell
Jesse looks to the front of the shop, where Hailey is helping the only customer. A brief respite. He just stands there for a minute, staring out over the counter to the front door. “I am fucking exhausted.”
When he glances over at me, I’m gazing sort of more at his chest than his face, half-dazed, not saying anything but nodding absently like a bobblehead doll some minutes after having been bobbled.
“But then you’re right there with me.”
“… yeah.”
It seems like far less than three minutes later that the big emergency door in the back bangs shut and Aaron has returned, as chipper and bright-eyed as ever. “Turkey time!”
• • •
BONING TURKEYS is not exactly an overnight trip to Paris on the Orient Express, but neither is it such a terrible ordeal. I remember the first time I boned a whole duck. It was a terrorizing experience, but incredibly satisfying once correctly done. The turkeys are like that, only bigger and less delicate and therefore less frightening. Start by slicing down the length of the backbone, then just work down the rib cage toward the breastbone, keeping your knife edge in against the bone rather than out so you don’t cut into the meat or, more important, through the skin. For the leg, work the meat off the thighbone, which you leave attached to the carcass, then separate the thighbone from the drumstick, at the joint. Once you’ve loosened the meat from the drumstick, you can just poke up from the bottom end and pull the bone clean out, like taking a shirt off over your head, turning it inside out in the process. The wing comes off in basically the same way, though it’s a bit tougher to wiggle out. Do the same on the other side, until the skeleton is connected to the flesh only at the thin ridge of cartilage running down the center of the breast. This is the only slightly tricky part, because the skin is thin here, and you don’t want to tear it—especially if you’re working for Aaron, who prides himself a stickler for such niceties. A bit of care will generally get you through with no harm done. And that’s that. Bones in one bin for making stock, flesh cleaned up a bit (as anyone who’s ever celebrated an Oktoberfest knows, turkey legs have some heavy-duty sinews, so you have to get those out), and you’re done. Simple.
Except. It turns out that these particular turkeys, leftovers from the Thanksgiving rush that have been languishing in the freezer ever since, are not, despite several days out of the freezer and in the cooler, what you’d call entirely thawed. Colin and I stand side by side, trying to get into the birds. Some are simply too rock-hard to cut. Others we can work with, but within seconds our hands are frozen to the bone. I have to take frequent hand-shaking breaks, flopping wildly around to get the blood circulating, a mixed blessing, since blood turns the frosty ache to burning needles. “Jesus good God Christ. Yowch.”
Colin is running his hands under hot water, wincing in a much more manly, understated way than I am. He tosses me a pair of latex gloves from the cardboard box that sits behind the counter. “Desperate times…”
And the gloves do help, some, with the cold. But there are so many turkeys to get through—about a dozen, I judge, looking at the overflowing bin—and all so very, very cold. And about three birds in, the inevitable happens. The tip of my knife slips, splits latex and then thumb flesh. And I don’t notice until I pull my hand out of the bird to warm it up. “Dammit.” Colin just looks up and gives me a sympathetic grimace. Gloves in the trash, it’s back to the kitchen sink and first-aid box for me.
For some reason, different animals cause differing amounts of pain and infection. Pork is the worst; a scrape against a bone immediately turns an angry, itching red. It stings like crazy when you wash it, and the mark of it remains, often for weeks. Beef, on the other hand, never seems to cause me problems at all. Turkeys are somewhere in the middle. I squeeze the cut, rather a deep one, to try to stop the bleeding. It doesn’t really want to stop, though. I find myself shifting in a slightly panicky way from one foot to the other. Though my brain does a fair job of handling cuts with gritty composure, my body still recoils at the sight of my own blood. I tend to get dizzy, my heart races. I do my best to suppress these shameful physical indications of squeamishness. Squeamishness is weakness. So I take a couple of huffed breaths, will myself to stop dancing about like a child who needs to pee. When the blood finally slows, I dab it with oregano oil—it does seem to prevent infection, hippie shit or not—and wrap it tight in a Band-Aid. Immediately have to replace it when blood soaks through it in seconds. Squeeze some more. Decide to sit down. This is not a major thing, of course—nothing at all really. I just need to sit.
Josh has a story about the early days of the store, when he was just learning butchery himself. Other than remembering some time spent, when he was a child, in his grandfather’s kosher shop, Josh hadn’t really any experience in the craft before he and Jessica made the quixotic leap to open a butcher shop in Kingston, New York. They didn’t decide to open Fleisher’s because they were big carnivores. On the contrary, Josh had been a vegan for seventeen years, and continued to practice this insanity for six months after the shop opened, until Jess finally laid down the law. “I cannot be the only person at this shop responsible for knowing what meat tastes like.” (Josh is now, needless to say, a passionate convert; he wears a shirt that says, BACON—THE GATEWAY MEAT.) No, they decided to open Fleisher’s because, basically, they’re hippies. Well, nouvelle hippies. Meat hippies. Which is an infinitely cooler thing. Meat hippies do things like write dissertations on pornography and travel throughout India alone (Jessica) and work as a bike messenger in the early nineties in Manhattan and possess childhood friends who grow marijuana in Vermont legally (Josh). They are willing to lose their shirts, if necessary, to open butcher shops selling nothing but hormone-free, grass- and grain-fed, humanely raised, local meat, but they’re frank in their hope that it will instead make them rich. They venture into ghettos to deliver free meat to old men on food stamps with chronic iron deficiencies, and they give coats and cars to their strapped employees. They hold Humvee drivers and sanctimonious vegetarians in equal contempt. They are passionate and outspoken and strong and skeptical and foulmouthed and hopeful. They’re the kind of people I want to be.
Anyway. When Fleisher’s first opened in 2004, it was just Josh and Jessica, breaking down meat and trying like hell to sell it. Josh enlisted Tom to teach him, and between Tom’s mentorship and much practice he caught on quickly. He was an experienced line cook, so knew at least a little about meat, and maybe those butcher genes got passed along as well. But much of the time he was alone in the shop with mountains of meat, cutting for hours on end. And Josh swears to me that he once managed to stab a knife straight through the back of his hand into the table. I really don’t quite know that I believe this, first of all because Josh has been known to exaggerate on occasion, and second because I just can’t picture what he could be doing that would result in that particular outcome. But he insists it happened, and insists that he pulled it out of the table and drove himself to the hospital, bleeding buckets.
So this little accident of mine definitely goes in the category of “no big deal.” I remind myself of that and man up. The bleeding does, eventually, mostly, stop. I bandage it again, and this time it stays bandaged.
It always takes a bit of a push to get myself back to the table after a cut. I linger over a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom, fiddle with the iPod. But I can’t leave Colin alone with those damned frozen birds any longer, and so at last I head back in. Within another hour or so we’ve got them all done, except of course for the ones that are still frozen solid.
“You finished?” Aaron has this way of sort of appearing out of nowhere, like a grade-school teacher with eyes in the back of his head. “Okay, now we’re going to make roulades out of them to roast for the case.” He takes one of the boned turkeys, now just an ungainly flap of meat, an uneven mess of pink flesh on one side, yellow goose-pimply skin on the other, and seasons the pink side generously with salt and pepper. Then he demonstrates how to roll it up into a
fat baguette, at a diagonal, so that the white meat of the breast and dark meat of the legs are evenly distributed, tucking in any loose, untidy bits. The roulade seems disconcertingly floppy, and I can see that Aaron is having a spot of trouble wrangling it together. He has to try a couple of times before he gets it into a shape he finds acceptable. Then he ties it, just as I tied the round roast earlier: one loop vertically along the loaf’s length, another horizontally, then lots of short loops across to form a long, skinny, perfect golden column of turkey.
It takes him about fifteen minutes, all in all. Which I figure translates for me into three quarters of an hour, easy.
And I’m right, for the first one, anyway. It turns out that making turkey roulades is the sort of thing that the phrase “herding cats” was invented for. Getting the thing rolled up, for starters, is like handling a passive resister. Some hunk of leg or dangling shred of wing is always slipping out of hand, flouting my efforts to make it conform to the status quo of cylindricality.
Once I do get it rolled up into some semblance of Aaron’s example, it is a tricky business keeping it there as I slide the string beneath it and try to tie. I tighten too much the first few times, and the cylinder gets pulled into a squishy U shape, or the loop of twine just slips right off, knotting itself up in the process. I don’t tighten enough, and the string comes right off when I adjust the turkey to apply the second loop. Finally I get the pressure right, and get the first two securely on. I start the short loops up and down the length of the thing. Again, squishiness is a factor. I’m not working with one muscle as I was with the round, a muscle with its own logic and shape. I’m forcing a gruesome mess of chopped and torn flesh into a logic of my (or Aaron’s) own.
It’s frustrating, improvisational work, a constant nudging and encouraging of meat to make it go where you want it. Turkey is stickier than beef or pork, too, coats the twine in a sheen of slick goo that makes the knots catch unexpectedly before they’re tight enough. Lots of twine goes to waste, down the mouth of the garbage can; I try to hide this evidence of my failure from Aaron, nudging bones on top to mask the frayed bits of string.
But when I do finally get everything tucked and secured and even, there’s a different kind of feeling of accomplishment. I’m not a sculptor who’s found the face that was already there in the marble. I’m a trainer who’s broken a wild stallion, neutered it and rendered it safe for children to ride in circles around a dusty ring at summer camp.
After the first roulade, it gets easier. I adjust my prodigious tying skills to this new challenge, and soon I’m churning them out at near-Aaron speeds. (Perhaps, in truth, even faster. I don’t like to confess even to myself how competitive I’ve become, and how inordinately proud of my little accomplishments. I guess even women are subject to testosterone poisoning.)
“That’s pretty good-looking,” Colin says.
“Thanks.”
“Way better than mine.”
“Oh, whatever.” I’m glad he said it. I was feeling guilty for noticing, not without a certain glee, that in fact mine do look a little better than his.
“You know, I was thinking,” Colin muses, as his thick fingers perform the delicate knotwork. “I think every time I read the word butchery from now on, it’s going to piss me off.”
“How so?”
“Well, you know, I read a lot of history. You know, military history. And I’ll come across sentences about ‘butchery on the battlefield,’ like butchery means something is bloody and messy and, I don’t know, unskilled. And it offends me a little, frankly. Because butchery is just the opposite of that.”
I am coming to love Colin. “I know just what you mean.”
“A thing of beauty, Jules,” Aaron says, arriving at the table to retrieve two of the roulades. “Bag the rest of them when you’re done. We’ll stick ’em in the freezer for later on.”
“Yup.” I whip out six more of the roulades before the day is out. Celebrate with a Mother’s Milk. And an ice pack for my left wrist.
I KNOW that Fleisher’s is a magical place, of course. But after several months of day-in, day-out work there, the magic becomes a sort of background glow, a happiness I don’t have to think about.
Sometimes when we’re walking Robert the Dog, some stranger will stop and exclaim, “My God, that’s a big dog!” And I look at him and suddenly I’m seeing him all over again, and I think, My God, he really is, isn’t he? That’s what it’s like bringing new people into the shop. What I’ve come to take for granted is passing strange to newcomers. Just the case, bursting with bright heaps of meat, brisket and ground lamb and racks of pork chops and sausage and liverwurst, is a source of wonder. When I pull open the door of the cooler in back by its great chrome latch, let visitors peer in at the sides of pork hanging like clothes in a crowded closet, I myself see it anew—a perverse take on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I find myself thinking again something I thought on my first day here, that should I dare to press through all that closely packed flesh, I would not be surprised to find some odd, thrilling new world on the other side.
“This is… amazing.”
“That’s good, right?” It’s always hard to know how Mom is going to react to things, even though over the years enough familial energy has been put into figuring it out to power a midsized city.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s… yes. It’s good.”
She, Dad, and my brother follow me through to the back of the shop. I explain about the salami closet and the sausage stuffer and all the prepared foods made in the shop, the soup and roast turkey and pâté and chicken potpie. Aaron and Colin are at the table, and Josh and Jessica are both assisting Hailey and Jesse at the counter because the crowd there is building up. Juan is bagging ground beef for wholesale orders in the city, ten-pound Cryovac bags he can now fill pretty reliably on gut instinct, using the scale only to double-check. (Anyone who’s ever worked a meat counter knows the oddly triumphant surge that comes with putting the meat on the scale and having it hit exactly the desired weight on the first try. It’s happened to me once or twice, and I always feel like ticker tape should start falling from the ceiling and party horns should blow in celebration. For Juan, though, it’s a regular occurrence.) Though everyone is busy, they all accept with equanimity the horde of meat-tourists trundling through the place. There are smiles and introductions all around. This is one way you can distinguish between Fleisher’s and your classic old-school butcher shop. There is a distinct lack of curtness.
“Your daughter rocks,” Josh tells my mom. “She is so fucking cool.”
“Oh!” My mother is not offended by the language Josh uses, to be sure, but she is just a tad taken aback by his enthusiasm. “I know she is.”
“You see this?” He forces me to make a muscle-boy curl and squeezes my biceps. “Hard as a rock.”
“Oh, please.” But although he exaggerates by a good long way, I allow myself to feel flattered. Under most circumstances, to be seen by my mother like this, with my greasy skin and hat-head hair and flushed face showing its tendency toward rosacea under no makeup and baggy T-shirt under white apron making me look even more like a sausage than usual, would have left me feeling distinctly uncomfortable, even ashamed. But here in the shop, I find I don’t worry so much.
“This,” I say, opening up the front cooler and pointing at the large, untidy parcel, wrapped badly by me in butcher paper, with my name written on it in black Sharpie, “is our Christmas dinner. I’m going to tie it up this afternoon. It is going to be gorgeous. I promise.”
I’m not in fact entirely certain on this front, but Aaron has assured me it will be a piece of cake. Well, we shall see. There’s still too much work left to be done at the shop for me to leave with my family. Once they head out with Eric—who’s been waiting outside with patient Robert—to find their cottage, I will set to work.
There are two racks of pork wrapped in that white paper—twelve rib chops in all, about fifteen pounds of meat and b
one. I’ve now learned how to do a crown roast, but this is happening on a scale some degree of magnitude beyond that of the dainty lamb half-crown I made before. Chining, the first step, is something I’ve not yet become entirely at ease with; I let Aaron walk me through it again. Unlike other, more straightforward uses of the giant scary band saw, with chining you have to improvise as you go, adjusting the line of the cut as you see fit, rather than just anchoring the meat to the table and buzzing through. I tend not to cut it as close as I really ought to do, out of hesitancy. Then I hold the rack by the ends and, just as with the lamb, cut through the vertebrae between each rib, without cutting too deeply into the eye of meat behind them, to give the rack the flexibility it will need if I’m to shape it into one half of a pork doughnut.
Next I have to French those rib ends. This I’m confident I know how to do, so I get out the spindle of twine, the cutting glove, and my knife.
By the end of twelve ribs, forty minutes later, I’ve gotten to be a fair hand at the Frenching. (Yeah, I admit, that really still just sounds dirty to me.) I often break the string as I tie and yank—even with the glove, my palm is red and pinched from the string’s bite—and more often than not I’ve allowed the gobbets of intercostal meat I pull off to fall to the floor rather than onto the table, from where it would then go into the luggers for grind. But pull it off I’ve learned to do, and I have to resort to scraping shreds messily with my knife on only two or three of the thicker bones. All that’s left is for me to tie the two racks together into a crown. I force each of them into a semicircle and, while Aaron helps me by holding them in place, I tie them together. Same concept as before: loop around the corset of ribs; hold the twine taut with right hand while looping over, under, and through with the left. Slide knot down, just a bit, then over, under, and through again. Give the end of the twine a firm, even pull, pinching the knot in the left hand, until the waist of the crown roast is tightly cinched. For a moment or two it’s touch and go as the racks try to make a break out of the circular shape Aaron is forcing them into. He holds firm, though, and I pull hard and tight, and in a matter of seconds it’s done. The crown is about the same circumference as a garbage can lid, the white rib bones splayed atop it, the eyes of the chops plumped out below like a muffin top over too-tight jeans, if muffin tops were to be considered lusciously attractive. Gorgeous.