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| Butcher the thought |
| Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi Dec 05, 2009, 00:40 IST |
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Perhaps it was Bill Buford who started it, back in 2006 with his food memoir, Heat. “I was home and wanted a pig,” he writes disarmingly. He finds one, in New York City, and brings it back to his apartment — a “definitively dead” 225-pound animal, wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet — braving his neighbours’ fear and loathing.
Buford butchers his pig himself, a process that takes six days. On the seventh day, he rests; and as readers came to the end of the “pig chapter” in Heat, most of us would have confessed to one of the more unworthy emotions — envy. There is nothing of the hunter and the gatherer involved in tracking down a Big Mac; most of us who eat meat in urban landscapes will never kill or butcher our own food. Buford had cracked the ultimate food porn fantasy: butchering your own meat.
Culinary schools in the UK, France and the US offer butchering classes as a matter of routine now, addressing a growing demand. Buford speculates that this is the enlightened meat-lover’s way of paying respect to the dead animal. It allows some to step closer to seeing meat not as a sanitised, shrink-wrapped product, but as something that was once part of a living animal. And let’s face it, it has major coolness points.
Julie Powell, who spent a year cooking from Julia Child’s recipes and wrote about it in Julie and Julia, attempts to record this in her new book, Cleaving. “If you look closely enough, if you get past the (formerly) white apron and the blood and the big knives bristling at my hip and up to my eyes, I’ll confess you might see something a bit unnerving there. A secret glow in the eyes. A little thrill.” It’s about the rush of power, and about the knowledge of the body that cutting into blood, bone and flesh offers — butchers have this, and so do surgeons. The rest of us can only speculate.
Or sharpen our knives. Recently, I watched a friend who’s a chef use his Global Steel knife on a side of pork. It was exactly like watching an artist at work — the same combination of mess and elegance. His movements were precise as he slid the blade cleanly through the fat, measured the angle at which to hack through bone, chose the grain he wanted. Watching butchers, and fishmongers, there is something beautiful about their assurance, their understanding that the respect and skill with which you cut will change the taste and nature of the food someone else will make.
There are no butchery classes for the amateur (though hotel culinary institutes offer this as part of the course) in India, so I have to ask my Nizamuddin and Old Delhi butchers for a favour: will they teach me how to cut? They think this is amusing, though my Nizamuddin butcher sometimes gets clients who will ask him to show them the moves. Chiefly men, chiefly foreigners. He gives me an afternoon of his time, a wickedly large cleaver, and we set to work.
I ruin two chickens and four legs of meat before the blade finally acquires a rudimentary slide. But on a shoulder, it suddenly comes to me; this is muscle, it must be cut this way, this is fat, this is bone, and each requires a different pressure, a different persuasion. My wrist muscles are tired because I’ve been using the wrong grip, but as I cut through the meat, guided by Rahim’s directions, it clicks into place. The meat falls into neat little cubes; I manage to sever bone cleanly, and I feel a sudden rush of heady power. Rahim looks at my efforts, expressionless, and then nods. “Not so bad,” he offers, “it could even be sold to a customer.”
It’s the best compliment I’ve ever been paid in my life. As I step out, suppressing an urge to buy cleavers, butchers’ blocks, a whole goat carcass, this discovery of an unsuspected blood lust should be worrying. And it is. But only a little, I think, my knife hand twitching.
(nilanjanasroy@gmail.com)
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