by Julie Powell
“Hey, I’m sorry, Aaron, can you walk me through some of this? I should have this down, I know…”
“You do one, and I’ll do one. Just look over when you get lost.”
So I stand next to him with two chucks laid out side by side on the table, watching for a moment or two before I get started. Aaron, like me, is left-handed, which makes this easier. I’ve grown accustomed over the years to having to mentally flip around any physical activity I am being taught to do, watching with my eyes sort of halfway crossed as I picture how to make it work in the opposite way. But when I watch Aaron, I don’t have to do that.
“How many people here at the shop are left-handed?”
“Well, there’s Colin. And Tom, I think.… Hailey,” he calls, without lifting his gaze from the shoulder, “are you a lefty?”
“No.”
“Aww. That’s too bad. You seem like you might be part of the team.”
Hailey screws up her face at him in mock annoyance. At least I think it’s mock.
“Jules, can you name all seven left-handed U.S. presidents?” Aaron in one of his quiz modes.
“Um, hmm.” Pulling my chuck shoulder toward me, inside of the chest cavity facing up, the top of the neck pointing away. I start with the easy part, cutting out the rope, a cylinder of meat nestled into the spine, rising up into the neck. It’s just like taking out the tenderloin, except less stressful because the meat is more or less worthless, going straight into grind or perhaps set aside by one of the cutters to take home; we all love cheap meat that also happens to be tasty, and the rope makes excellent stew meat. “Let’s see. Clinton, I know. And Bush—”
“Which Bush?”
“The elder, of course. C’mon. Like that moron could be a lefty? Reagan.”
“You got three.”
“Ford… Truman?” Having tossed the rope aside, I’ve put down my knife and picked up the butcher’s saw. I cut through the rib bones on either end, both right up close to the spine, where the rope used to be, and right up against the breastbone, which (if you want to picture this on yourself again) is where the two sides of your rib cage came together in front in a wedge of cartilage when you were still whole. On the other side of that cartilage is a big hunk of yellowed fat where breasts would be if steer had the same kind of breasts we do. The sawing is the slightest bit tricky. Because the arm and shoulder are tucked up under there, the whole piece doesn’t lie flat, but tips toward you, with the far, top end of the rack of ribs higher than the bottom part. This angle is not ideal, since you don’t want to saw deeply into the flesh below the ribs. You have to sort of squat and come at the ribs from below so that by the time you get through the bottom rib you haven’t delved deep into the muscle at the top end.
“That’s right.”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
Aaron straightens up and, still gripping his knife, sticks out first his thumb and then his index finger. “Hoover, Garfield.”
“Not a universally stellar lot, it must be said.” I’ve taken knife back in hand, in a pistol grip, and am cutting down right over the upper edge of the top rib until I hit a thick white layer of fat. Down the slices I’ve made on either side of the ribs, I rake my knife to find that same obvious line of fat. “Did you know Barack Obama is left-handed?”
“What is the deal with you people?” Jesse pipes up. It’s a slow February day, he’s lackadaisically wiping down the counters just for something to do. “As if a shared demographic of deadly accidents and heightened suicide rates is something to be proud of.”
“Heeey,” says Aaron. “We’re brilliant! We’re creative! We’re tortured!”
I don’t say anything, but I’m smiling down into my meat.
“Heeey. I thought you were left-handed.”
I’m sitting across from D at a diner on the Upper East Side. He’s got a forkful of omelet halfway to his mouth, in his right hand. But can that be? I distinctly remember the moment, a couple of weeks back, when I’d noticed he was a fellow traveler. I was tied up at the time, as it were, and had my mind on other things, so I didn’t mention it, but I’d certainly filed it under the category of Fun Facts to Know and Tell.
He understands immediately where I’ve gotten the idea, and gives me one of his little half leers. “No, I only do one thing with my left hand.”
And now comes the fun part. This is actually one of my favorite things to do—not even just in butchery terms, but in general. I mean, I can think of a few things that top it. But in much the same way as knowing a trick in a computer game, where the power nugget is hidden or where you have to jump with triple speed at just the right moment to escape the ravening what-have-you, taking off this section of ribs feels like engaging in a privileged, secret shortcut. Take the meat hook in your right hand (if you’re a lefty) and thrust it down through the meat over and under the top rib, so that the hooked end comes up between it and the second rib down. Then just pull. The seam separating the ribs from the fat below is thick and lusty, and comes apart with a gratifyingly sticky noise, no knife required, except maybe at the very end. Set the ribs aside. You can slice these with the band saw into short ribs, if you like; sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. We generally have more short ribs than we can sell, and the ones made from this end are not quite so meaty as the ones that come from lower down, in the rib section. But I’ll probably set a few aside to bring home with me when I head back to the city tonight. I like taking meat that isn’t costing Josh much money.
Once you get off the ribs, you reveal the brisket, treasured by Texans for barbecue and Jews for pastrami and Passover pot roast. This is also not difficult to remove, though the first step, stripping off the cartilage-lined forward end of the rib cage, isn’t exactly a barrel of monkeys. The bone dissolves into cartilage, which is easily sliced into. You’d think this would make it simple, but what it means in effect is that it’s easy, when scraping your knife down underneath the knobby arc to loosen it from the meat below, to inadvertently leave some inedible white bits embedded in the brisket, which you’ll then have to shave off.
Next stick your knife in just below the armpit (it’s not called an armpit on a steer, I don’t imagine, but for the sake of the imagery), under the brisket muscle, and drag it horizontally toward the spine. Then make another, vertical cut from there straight down the middle of where the ribs once lay, down to the next tier of fat. Then the brisket, too, can be peeled loose with a good tug of the meat hook. Beneath that is a fatty layer in which is buried a small, long muscle that most butchers disregard but that Josh has us roll out. He will later cut it into two-inch round pieces, roll each one in a strip of house-made bacon, and sell them as “faux fillets” for eight bucks a pound.
Now we get to the pain-in-the-ass bit.
The irritating thing about a shoulder is that after all the work it takes to break it down—and I haven’t remotely gotten to the tough part yet—most of the meat is, while exceedingly tasty, not worth a great deal. Chuck eye, shank, brisket—all are fatty, cheap cuts that need to be cooked a long time in a slow oven until they melt into fall-apart tenderness. The one exception, and it is a bitch of one, is the clod. This piece lies atop the shoulder blade, adhering tightly to that triangle of bone that looks nothing like any other bone in the body—a widening expanse of gray, shaped like a shovel’s blade, to which the meat ferociously fuses. The clod is quite valuable, not so much for the retail market as for wholesale; trendy New York chefs buy it and slice it into steaks, roast it whole, even grind it for those high-end, thirty-buck hamburgers they all feel like they have to have on their menu these days. And they want it entire, a wide triangle of beef unmarred by errant knife strokes. So this is where it gets really tricky. I stand, just staring down at the shoulder for a moment. “Okay, Aaron? This is where I need some help.”
“Flip the whole piece over, first of all. So the foreleg is on top.” The thing is damned heavy, and cumbersome. It takes some doing to turn it. Once I do, Aaron reaches over and pal
pates the fat and meat with his thumb. “Feel right here,” he says. Sure enough, there is a distinct thin run of bone slicing straight through the flesh like a shark’s fin through water—the ridge of the shoulder blade, set at a ninety-degree angle to the bone’s flat wedge, which widens and thins out into cartilage toward the side of the cut facing toward us. The ridge runs from the blade’s upper point, where it meets the shank, down to nearly the bottom of the triangle, where it shrinks to nothing as the bone peters out into cartilage.
“Start there, with that,” says Aaron. Then he gestures with his knife, indicating a triangular shape from along that line up to the joint and then over, along the length of the shank bone. “This is the money cut. So don’t screw it up.”
“You do realize, right, that I’ve had three different people show me how to cut out the clod, some of them several times, and every single time, I swear to God, they’ve done it differently?”
“That’s good! If you learn different ways to approach it, you’ll figure out how the thing really works. There’s a logic to it. Figure it out, and you’ll be able to butcher any animal on your own. You can butcher people once you figure this out.”
“Whatever. I like rote learning.”
“Go ahead. You’ll remember as you go.”
I start by exposing the top edge of the blade bone, moving down carefully so the knife doesn’t meander off track. All the way up to the joint and then over, along the line of the shank. I’ve now outlined the edges of the clod, what I’m to pull out. I dip my knife back into the cut I’ve made to the ridge top and work my way, so carefully, down, along the right side of it. From the lower edge of the chuck, facing me, up to the joint, I meticulously loosen meat from bone.
Now, if I were Aaron, I would hook my left forearm under the upper tip of the clod, hold the blade bone down to the table with my right palm, and rip the muscle off in one manly swoop, cleanly breaking the tight bond, leaving the blade bone bare, the muscle untorn. The sheen of the silvery layer that fused the two together would come away with the meat, rendering the surface of the clod smooth and dry, as if covered in wax paper. It’s one of those little miracles of butchery, the expert tearing out of a shoulder clod.
I, however, am no Aaron. I give it a try—a wrenching pull, as I clasp the meat to my chest—but I haven’t the strength, or maybe I just don’t have the nerve to use it. The clod comes up a few inches, then catches, hung up, threatening to rip. Still applying upward pressure so I can see into the crevice I’ve started to open, I stick my fingers in there and push with a windshield-wiper back-and-forth motion against the tight edge of that fusion, feeling for the points that are resisting. With my fingertips, I urge them to give. A knife would be quicker, but far messier. I want to do this right.
“How you doin’ there?”
“Okay. I’d rather be slow than destructive.”
“All a balance, Jules. All a balance.”
“How very Zen of you.”
Laboriously I pull up, then dig in, pull up and dig in, working the muscle loose bit by painful bit. It’s half an hour before I get the thing mostly up, so that only the cartilaginous hypotenuse of the blade bone is still attached to the meat. I hold up the clod with my right hand, and with my left I fumble about for my knife without looking, which (if I thought about it for two seconds I would realize) is seriously stupid but is something I’ve become very used to doing. Once I have it in hand I use it to break that last connection—a small bit of cheating I can live with. The bone beneath is as smooth and gray as an overcast sky.
“Christ,” I whisper as I at last drop the clod onto the table. I’m sweating.
“What’s your time on that? Got four more chucks back there to do.”
“I’m working on it, I’m working on it.” Out of the corner of my mouth, Indiana Jones style. Grumbling playfully so as not to grumble in earnest.
The other bad thing about chuck shoulders is that once you’ve gotten the clod off, a satisfying but exhausting achievement, there’s still a ton left to do, most of it tedious. The neck bone, complicatedly buried in the meat, has to come off to get at the chuck eye. Inevitably a lot of flesh will come off with it, which later will have to be trimmed away, shred by shred, in among all the knobs and crannies of the vertebrae, which, you will find yourself thinking, are just entirely too fussy and clearly designed by nature as a sort of posthumous “fuck you” from steer to butcher.
Rolling out the chuck eye is sort of fun, as all cuts with a good, sticky, easy-to-follow seam are, but then I have to crack off the shank, breaking into a really tricky joint that it sometimes seems I will never be able to penetrate. Once I do, and push down hard, there is that lovely pop as the joint opens, then the obscene slow drip of clear synovial fluid. But the meat of the leg, once pulled off the bone, is threaded through with thick sinews that must be shaved out. The rest of the meat—and there is still a lot of it—just goes into the grinder. But before that happens, the remaining bones have to be pulled out, and a thick chunk of fat buried between muscles, which you might think you could just carelessly chop up, has to be removed, as it is riddled with glands. The glands are fascinating to look at, shiny, rubbery nuggets, gray or deep burgundy or occasionally green, but they are things you definitely do not want popping up in your hamburger.
Finally, finally, I finish. It’s taken me a solid hour. Aaron has broken down three in that time. “Good Lord.”
“There’s one more back there,” Aaron says, grunting a little as he pulls his clod loose. “Want me to go get it for you?”
“No, I can handle it.” In truth I’m not sure that I can. Chuck shoulders weigh about a hundred fifty pounds, and they’re awkward, with no convenient way to get a solid hold on them. But I have just taken more than an hour to break one down, and I’m not about to ask for any coddling at this point. I head back to the cooler.
Sometimes the chucks are hanging off hooks from bars, which makes getting a grip on them marginally easier, but I’m not in luck today, for this one is sitting on one of the Metro shelves, at just about thigh level. Conscientiously bending my knees, I squat in front of it, force my arms under the shank on one side and under the backbone on the other, and start to lift.
It’s a close thing. I very nearly make it, nearly get the weight of the thing balanced just right. But at the last minute, just as I’m about to straighten my knees, it goes wrong, I topple, fall onto my back, and the chuck is now protected from the floor by my hips, on which it’s heavily resting.
Crap.
I will have to call for help, of course. But for a long while, I don’t. I lie there, my bones grinding into the floor, contemplating the laughable fate of dying under a mountain of beef. The funniest part is, this is really not such an unfamiliar position I find myself in.
“Er… Juan?” No one will hear me back here behind this insulated steel door unless I shout. Juan is the person I am least embarrassed to have to ask for help, he is completely without the supercilious gene, and besides, we have a shared history of cooler accidents. Some months ago, I was in here with him, helping him arrange an alarming surfeit of meat. Four thick steel rods rested on the top shelves of two Metro units pushed up against either wall, and on them were hung side after side after side of pork, beef shoulders and rounds, lamb. It was a deeply overcrowded walk-in closet of flesh. Juan, being both smaller and stronger than I, was three rows deep in the stuff, pushing bodies around, when a harsh, shrieking crack made us both glance up at the rods overhead. We assumed that they were beginning to give under the weight. But it was worse than that. The Metro—industrial shelving units designed to bear thousands of pounds—was bending, sinking, swaybacked under the rods like it was melting. “Um, maybe you should—” But Juan was already scurrying out from under the meat curtains that were starting to shift ominously. He got out seconds before the things started giving way, pork and beef tumbling down with slow, collapsing groans. It was an awe-inspiring sight, like watching a tall ship sinking after a disast
rous naval engagement, masts smashing one by one, hull wrenching apart, splintering.
“What the hell is going on in there?” We heard Jessica bellow. But until she swung open the door, we didn’t answer, just stared at the destruction, the completeness of it, not yet even beginning to contemplate how we would go about picking up the pieces. “Well, you got out from under, at least.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” I ogled the devastation. Almost reveled in it. What now?
“Wow.”
So, yeah, Juan and I have shared a moment. He’s the one to call.
“Juan? A little help?”
By the time Juan gets me out from under the chuck, racks of ribs, peeled off the shoulders, are beginning to pile up next to the band saw. I’m no longer afraid of the saw. In fact, I rather enjoy it, the efficiency of it and the noise, the electric smell of singed bone. Without being asked I begin to saw the racks into two-inch strips, across the bones, for short ribs.
Of course, there are many, many things I love to eat. Liver, as I believe I’ve mentioned. The occasional Skittle or Cheeto, sad to say, does tempt.
But short ribs are perhaps my very favorite thing to eat. Maybe along with oxtail. Now, there’s favorite, and favorite, of course. An exquisitely aged strip steak, of the kind Josh and Jess sell at Fleisher’s—from a beast raised on grass and just a bit of good grain, living a life as pleasant as a steer’s life can be, aged for three weeks until the flesh is buttery and the meaty flavor is concentrated to an almost unbearable degree—is a rare pleasure (at twenty-five bucks a pound it ought to be rare, anyway), sexy and indulgent and rather like being in bed with a man who does things just right, without being asked.