Cleaving by Julie Powell

Author:Julie Powell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780316054485
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

9

Too Close for Comfort Food

EVERY STEER THAT comes into the shop arrives broken into eight pieces, called "primals." The best way to picture these primals is to use your own body as a sort of guide. First, hang yourself by a hook upside down, gut yourself, take off your head, and cut yourself in half vertically. The next cut you'll make--just at the wide fan of the shoulder blade--will take off one of your chuck shoulder primals. An arm, a shoulder, and half of your neck and chest. Next to come off are your rib sections--all but the very top of your rib cage. Then cut off your loin sections, making the cut right at your tailbone. What you've got left hanging is your two legs and buttocks. These are what are called "rounds." Butchery-wise, I've pretty much got breaking down rounds, well, down.

Chuck shoulders, though, are a whole other problem. This is the biggest primal on the animal, and full of funkily shaped bones, knobby vertebrae, which, unlike the loin and rib sections, have to be removed to get to the meat. And then there's the blade bone, an epic battle just in itself. Someday, maybe, I hope, I will be able to break down a shoulder in fifteen minutes, and that is when I'll know I'm a real butcher. For now it takes me, I shit you not, close to an hour and a half.

"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

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