Eat the City(35)

At New York Butchers in the 1950s, two men would lift a steer into position as a third slit its throat so the beast’s life would end in a single stroke, making a kosher kill. The “head man” would cut off the head, and the skinner would use long, graceful sweeps of his knife to peel the hide. A butcher would step in to drop the intestines in a corner, and place the lungs, heart, and lymph nodes in separate little trays. Inspectors would examine each tray, palpate the liver, and cut through the wet, warm heart—seeking any indication of tuberculosis, measles, or worms, recalled Enrico Sciorra, who then worked there as a USDA veterinarian. Men cut all night long, and then loaded meat into trucks packed with ice for delivery to Fourteenth Street plants.

But people complained. They wanted the slaughterhouses out. It wasn’t the stench of death or of meat—it was the rich, overpowering smell of life: the manure, the feed, the anxious, crowded animals. Slaughtering ceased by 1960 and the building was eventually judged unsafe and torn down in 1991.


THE staff of the Meat Hook offers classes on making sausage and charcuterie, on barbecue (either Texas or Carolinas style), on how to cook meat, on braising and roasting, on country hams, on meat and gin, on pig butchering, and even one they call date night butchering—“It’s Saturday night, you can have a couple drinks,” Tom Mylan once explained, “hang out, watch some butchering, and go out to eat afterwards.” In a sense, Tom is teaching people how to eat meat the old-fashioned way. Most people are used to buying chicken breasts and strip steaks, not figuring out what to do with livers and knuckles and lesser cuts of loin.

Tom launches his pig butchering class while sipping a Genesee Cream Ale. He gestures toward the rows of Brooklyn Lager and the bottle opener attached to the wall: “Help yourself.” Before class begins, there will be warnings about the three-horsepower Hobart grinder, which works through more than twenty pounds of meat a minute. “Your arm probably only weighs three or four pounds, so stay away from that,” says Ben Turley. As the group assembles in the butchery, sipping on beers, Tom will carry in the pig: dead, plucked, gutted, pink.

He will explain that it was killed calmly, cleanly, without pain, electrodes like salad tongs on its head zapping it unconscious so its jugular vein might be quickly slashed. Next it was dunked in scalding water, scraped of bristles, gutted, relieved of heart and lungs, and finally sprayed with a mild dilution of white vinegar to kill bacteria. In Tom’s telling, it sounds neat, careful, almost kind.

Tom will pick up the pig’s head and point to the tasty bits. “The brain is edible,” he will say, “though not one of my favorite things.” Not as nice as lamb brains, for instance. “Young animals have better-tasting brains,” says Tom, who traces the geography of the pig as he cuts into it. The neck, the shoulder, the top butt, the picnic ham, he says, naming each part as he separates it from its attachments.

Center-cut pork chops, the loin, the belly, spare ribs, baby back ribs, the sirloin, the tenderloin. The ham, the hock, the trotter. He explains the animal using a combination of technical butcher’s terms and profanity, which gives the impression of speaking just between you and me, as though he has picked you personally to share his deep secrets of meat. He mentions amazing YouTube videos made by packing house workers with cell phone cameras: “It’s almost like a crazy Samurai movie, where they’ll sharpen their knives and they just go whoooosh, and you’re like, ‘Did they even touch the meat?’ ”

Parts of the animal embody taboos in food: raw things, slippery things, bits that are wobbly and jiggly and gristly, scrappy and shimmery and sinewy. This is what butchering is about, Tom says. “We add value to the undesirable parts of the animal.” There’s only one skirt steak on every cow, but the rest of the animal can’t just be thrown away. When you receive a whole animal from a farm instead of boxes of identical, factory-produced parts, you have to figure out utility for everything.

Tom will suggest throwing in a dollop of mustard if you can’t take the organy goodness of sautéed kidney. He will talk about uses for the Jell-O-like leaf lard from the animal’s gastrointestinal tract. He will tell how he makes jerky sticks out of beef and pork hearts and tongues, chili containing pork skin, scrapple from the head meat, blood sausages and blood cakes. The shop boils bones and scraps into broths, including Chinese chicken broth, ramen broth, and beefy Vietnamese pho. “It might only take you six months to learn how to cut up animals anatomically,” Tom likes to say. “It takes years to figure out how to sell every part of the animal. If I see anything in the trash, it’s our failure.”

Tom will show the class his ebony-handled knife with a carbon-steel blade and hand-hammered brass star-shaped rivets. Unlike plastic, the ebony does not get slippery with fat. The knife was a special sale from Tom’s knife-sharpener, Robert Ambrosi, who is part of a clan of sharpeners who have served the city’s meatpackers for generations. It was produced long ago by Robert’s great-grandfather’s upstate company. Tom will tell his students that he doesn’t like to use his new band saw after all, because it lacks romance and manual labor—and because, well, he’s scared of it. Tom is so enamored of the knife, on the other hand, that he posted its photograph on his Facebook page.

“You want meat that smells like meat and looks like meat—not pink, but bright red. It shouldn’t smell like a refrigerator,” says Tom to his meat and gin class, in which students learn to pair various kinds of meat with particular gin drinks. The resinous spices in gin work well with paté and duck, Tom explains. To go with drinks including a Tom Collins and a gin martini, Tom has prepared country paté, lamb, dry-aged steaks, and chorizo-stuffed duck hearts—looking moist and shaped just like the medical diagrams of human hearts, only tiny. “It’s very sanguineous, like, sort of bloody,” he says. “It tastes a lot like duck breast but more profound.”