Eat the City(28)
A scroll of smoke blows across the hot, blue sky and Tom stands under it, smoking an American Spirit yellow and sipping a Brooklyn Brewery beer. The by-product of this beer, its leftover mash, had once helped nourish this growing pig, when it was trucked over from Williamsburg as feed. Tom flattens the spread of wood and charcoal on the fire. The pig has to cook both slowly and evenly so the muscle fibers don’t contract and dry out, and so the collagen converts to gelatin, keeping the meat juicy. Clearly this cooking technique was developed by people with lots of firewood and spare time.
By dusk, the hog is hissing and crackling, its skin mostly an orangey fake-tan color, with highlights of red and charred black. It takes four men to lift the hot rack and sizzling animal back to the table, where Tom cuts the pig loose and leaves it to cool. An intense, porky perfume summons people—casual farm visitors, Tom’s restaurant friends and fellow butchers, and guests who had officially signed up for the farm’s 2009 Fourth of July pig roast campout.
People reach out to peel off roasted skin, burning their fingers as juices drip out of the meat, but they don’t stop. They reach for the skin of the back, the meat of the cheeks, they dig with their fingers into the cheekbone. “I want pig!” kids start to call.
Tom draws his knife through the flesh of the pig’s shoulder and its thigh, extracting more rich, wobbly pieces of fat-infused white meat. Soon the animal is a slash of intense, savory flavor in barbecued pork sandwiches. Wetting and oiling the flimsy paper plates, the meat is a fragrant and intoxicating cut of intensely smoked pork, with fugitive heat from the chiles and a special kind of tenderness from the richness of its marbled fat.
After dinner, Tom hotwires the farm’s E-Z-GO golf cart. He and the other butchers grab their ladies and their bottles and race around the farm grounds—right past the empty pigpen—only to come back and dance by the bonfire to Ace Frehley’s “Back in the New York Groove,” spraying each other with booze. Tom, Ben Turley, and Brent Young have just quit their jobs and are about to start their own butcher shop. Hard work is ahead, but at the moment, they feel free and happy to be alive.
“The three of us remember it as the best night ever,” Tom would say years later. Late that night, Tom falls asleep in a half-collapsed blue tent he is too drunk to completely set up, in a field of dozens of similar tents. All around him, people are drinking and dancing and now sleeping under the stars, bellies and hearts full of this meat they consumed on the very spot where it was raised.
It’s become an extreme-locavore standard: Catch your own meat. Eat it on site. Revel with the hipstavores, the gastronauts, the local fooderati, around an open fire. Find a more primal connection to the land where you are, even if that land is New York City. Still, there’s something arresting and implausible about this bygone open landscape on the edge of Queens, where the pig ate nuts and roots and brewery mash and, in turn, offered up its flavorful meat to be consumed. Roasting a whole pig is drama and spectacle, like edible storytelling, Tom says. The moral of the story is that meat tastes better when it’s well-raised, carefully cooked, and eaten in an atmosphere where strangers might become friends. “The whole point of doing this, for me, anyway, is to really get people’s undivided attention and make them think about where their food comes from,” Tom says.
The very name of the butcher shop that Tom and his partners are preparing to open—The Meat Hook—harks back to an earlier time, when whole animals were delivered to New York butchers and their carcasses moved on hooks on ceiling tracks. Now, sirloin and strip steaks and pork chops are mostly vacuum-packed, boxed in enormous plants and shipped directly to supermarkets. But Tom is nostalgic for that earlier era, when people knew their butchers and understood their meat.
“I like to call it regressive, before boxed beef, before feedlots,” he says. “The Meat Hook is an act of nostalgia, but is also trying to move everything forward.”
“In my secret heart, I wish we could go back to the America of my grandfather. He could tell you what any cut was on the steak.”
· · ·
NOTHING is so antithetical to the urban, the urbane—the sophisticated city—as keeping and killing livestock. A European visitor to New York in 1830 was appalled that slaughterhouses were “scattered over many populous districts of the city,” filling the air with “the most noxious effluvia.” Blood saturated absorbent wooden slaughterhouse floors, where it rotted and gave off “offensive odors,” complained the New York Board of Health. Offal piled in the sewers produced horrible fumes, and draped across the sewer openings was a pretty white mold feeding on animal decay, which people called “lace curtains.”
The miasma theory of disease postulated that illnesses such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, cholera, and typhoid arose from noxious odors. People were outraged by the prospect that animal smells were not only unsavory, but also unsafe. In a meeting with the city’s sanitary inspector, one reporter unrolled a map of recent diphtheria and typhoid cases, showing that they coincided with the slaughterhouse districts—gotcha!
Yet in an era before refrigeration, animals had to be marched into the city “on the hoof,” to be killed near where they would be eaten. Steak, it turns out, is a city meal. The American myth of the cowboy on the open plain had its terminus in a crowded, dark city restaurant where people ate their steaks standing up, dispatching the cows the cowboys corralled. Beef eaters were simply more common in cities, whose sheer numbers of people could support a steady demand for large animals.