Eat the City(34)
At the Meat Hook, the bell on the door keeps ringing and the flow of customers is steady. “Hey, you! Want to play video games with me tonight?” Ben calls from behind the counter to a stranger. “I brought this for you,” says a different man, bearded and flannel-shirted, tenderly placing a plastic container on the counter. “It’s the last of my chicken stock. I wanted you to try it.” A guy who works at the wine tasting room of Brooklyn Oenology stops in, an editor of local Edible magazines buys merguez sausages, and the founders of a new distillery show up and ask Tom’s advice on stills. “We’re trying to build a human community around something cool that we do,” says Tom.
Finally, while Tom’s out front smoking, the red pickup truck from the Queens farm pulls up, and a sweet-faced farm girl, as Tom calls her, smilingly introduces her dead pigs. “This one has a nineteen-and-a-half-pound head,” she says, patting it affectionately.
Tom hugs her warmly with his thick butcher’s arms, squeezing her hard and picking her up off the ground. Then he takes the first pink pig in a similar embrace, heaving it over his shoulder and walking inside, the knives of his scabbard clanking together while the pig’s curly tail wags on his back. He deposits the first pig in the walk-in cooler, and comes back for the next, which he flops onto the butchering table in the center of the shop.
The pig is pink-skinned and mostly plucked, but has short bristles on its nose and its chin, like an old man no longer grooming himself with much attention. Tom plans to sell the shoulders and hams in the shop but to return the chops and sausages to Queens to serve at a dinner on the farm.
“Mmmm,” he says, tapping each fingertip, making eeny meeny miney moe fingers as he decides which end to butcher first. Sometimes he’ll toss a coin: If it’s heads, he’ll start from the snout; if it’s tails, he’ll start from the hindquarters. This time, he picks up a rear leg and lights into it with a five-inch Forschner boning knife from Switzerland.
He works his knife along the animal’s tendons and muscles, freeing each piece from its confines in the binding fat. There are two butchering techniques, he explains. In one, you cut alongside the muscle and bone, and in the other, you cut through them at cross angles. Tom does both. He makes a kind of fist over the knife to give him leverage to draw it back toward himself in the pig. “It has double the usual fat,” he says, assessing the white gel, three inches thick. “The meat is this amazing dark red color because the pigs have just been eating fresh vegetables from the farm,” he says, holding the carcass steady. “Muscles that do a lot of work have more flavor. Muscles that do less work have less flavor.”
This is a beautiful specimen, but Tom plans to make future pigs even tastier. Hogs that eat acorns near the end of their lives taste intensely porky, he says; the rich, tannic nuts amplify the flavor of their meat, making it as different from regular heritage-breed pork as most heritage-breed hogs are from industrially produced pigs. Tom had an idea for a promotion in the store: If you bring in five-gallon buckets of acorns to feed the pigs in Queens, you get a discount on meat. He likes the thought of building the pigs’ flavor.
Tom returns to the animal to peel its skin, which comes off in neat strips, as if he were peeling a fruit. Somehow it looks appetizing, even raw. “If it’s killed badly, you’ll see little blood spots, showing the animal was stressed,” he says. “This one doesn’t have that.” He digs his knife in, jerks it around, and pulls out a pig drumstick, then a pig hoof. He has a sureness of hand and he leans into the cut, using his weight to drive effortlessly through the flesh. He went to art school for sculpture, and it’s easy to imagine him carving clay with the same careful motions. At times, Tom lays his palm down flat, moving across the animal with unexpected intimacy, extending his hands-on physicality to the pork.
I remember that Tom told Nerve, the online literary sex magazine, that becoming a butcher had changed his perception of human beings. “I definitely look at everyone and everything like I’m judging a steer on the hoof. Remember that you want an animal that has a shiny coat, has good conformation and isn’t too skinny,” he said. “Skinny animals have bad genetics and taste gamey.” He’s confident and sure of his touch and his impact on the meat, and if there’s something sexy about butchering, it’s that—it shows a man who’s comfortable with flesh.
SHEEP and cattle scampered to their deaths on Fortieth Street at the East River, an area spotted with gas tanks, tenements, and junkyards, until the place was slated as the headquarters of the newly chartered United Nations. As planners articulated a new vision for a city scrubbed of industry, the East Side slaughterhouses cleared out to make way for a postwar icon of global power.
That left only the West Side slaughterhouses to supply the Fourteenth Street Market. As the streets clogged with chrome-trimmed Packards and Cadillacs with fins, it became more challenging to drive cattle through Midtown West. Back in the 1870s, a cow tunnel had been built under Thirty-Fourth Street so the cattle coming in from New Jersey by barge would not disrupt traffic, and in 1932, a second tunnel was constructed under Thirty-Eighth Street. By the 1950s, freight trains deposited animals directly in the Manhattan stockyards adjacent to most of the slaughterhouses.
A block away on Thirty-Ninth Street, only the New York Butchers Dressed Meat Company slaughterhouse, featuring six limestone heads of rams and steers on the fa?ade, still had to move cattle through the streets. A “Judas steer”—an animal docile enough to lead the rest of the herd to the slaughter—would head off the procession through alleys and up the street to New York Butchers. Once when the Hudson River froze, a steer galloped across the thick sheet of ice toward New Jersey. Sometimes, animal handlers from the slaughterhouse had to chase a steer through Midtown streets with a tranquilizer gun. In one unsavory episode, they caught a steer by smashing into him with a truck, tying him to the vehicle, and dragging the moaning beast for blocks. The following year, workers finally built a fourteen-foot-high aluminum-covered bridge from the stockyards so animals could walk securely to the slaughterhouse.