Josh has a story about the early days of the store, when he was just learning butchery himself. Other than remembering some
time spent, when he was a child, in his grandfather's kosher shop, Josh hadn't really any experience in the craft before he
and Jessica made the quixotic leap to open a butcher shop in Kingston, New York. They didn't decide to open Fleisher's because
they were big carnivores. On the contrary, Josh had been a vegan for seventeen years, and continued to practice this insanity
for six months after the shop opened, until Jess finally laid down the law. "I cannot be the only person at this shop responsible
for knowing what meat tastes like." (Josh is now, needless to say, a passionate convert; he wears a shirt that says,
BACON
--
THE GATEWAY MEAT
.) No, they decided to open Fleisher's because, basically, they're hippies. Well, nouvelle hippies. Meat hippies. Which is
an infinitely cooler thing. Meat hippies do things like write dissertations on pornography and travel throughout India alone
(Jessica) and work as a bike messenger in the early nineties in Manhattan and possess childhood friends who grow marijuana
in Vermont legally (Josh). They are willing to lose their shirts, if necessary, to open butcher shops selling nothing but
hormone-free, grass- and grain-fed, humanely raised, local meat, but they're frank in their hope that it will instead make
them rich. They venture into ghettos to deliver free meat to old men on food stamps with chronic iron deficiencies, and they
give coats and cars to their strapped employees. They hold Humvee drivers and sanctimonious vegetarians in equal contempt.
They are passionate and outspoken and strong and skeptical and foulmouthed and hopeful. They're the kind of people I want
to be.
Anyway. When Fleisher's first opened in 2004, it was just Josh and Jessica, breaking down meat and trying like hell to sell
it. Josh enlisted Tom to teach him, and between Tom's mentorship and much practice he caught on quickly. He was an experienced
line cook, so knew at least a little about meat, and maybe those butcher genes got passed along as well. But much of the time
he was alone in the shop with mountains of meat, cutting for hours on end. And Josh swears to me that he once managed to stab
a knife straight through the back of his hand into the table. I really don't quite know that I believe this, first of all
because Josh has been known to exaggerate on occasion, and second because I just can't picture what he could be doing that
would result in that particular outcome. But he insists it happened, and insists that he pulled it out of the table and drove
himself to the hospital, bleeding buckets.
So this little accident of mine definitely goes in the category of "no big deal." I remind myself of that and man up. The
bleeding does, eventually, mostly, stop. I bandage it again, and this time it stays bandaged.
It always takes a bit of a push to get myself back to the table after a cut. I linger over a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom,
fiddle with the iPod. But I can't leave Colin alone with those damned frozen birds any longer, and so at last I head back
in. Within another hour or so we've got them all done, except of course for the ones that are still frozen solid.
"You finished?" Aaron has this way of sort of appearing out of nowhere, like a grade-school teacher with eyes in the back
of his head. "Okay, now we're going to make roulades out of them to roast for the case." He takes one of the boned turkeys,
now just an ungainly flap of meat, an uneven mess of pink flesh on one side, yellow goose-pimply skin on the other, and seasons
the pink side generously with salt and pepper. Then he demonstrates how to roll it up into a fat baguette, at a diagonal,
so that the white meat of the breast and dark meat of the legs are evenly distributed, tucking in any loose, untidy bits.
The roulade seems disconcertingly floppy, and I can see that Aaron is having a spot of trouble wrangling it together. He has
to try a couple of times before he gets it into a shape he finds acceptable. Then he ties it, just as I tied the round roast
earlier: one loop vertically along the loaf's length, another horizontally, then lots of short loops across to form a long,
skinny, perfect golden column of turkey.
It takes him about fifteen minutes, all in all. Which I figure translates for me into three quarters of an hour, easy.
And I'm right, for the first one, anyway. It turns out that making turkey roulades is the sort of thing that the phrase "herding
cats" was invented for. Getting the thing rolled up, for starters, is like handling a passive resister. Some hunk of leg or
dangling shred of wing is always slipping out of hand, flouting my efforts to make it conform to the status quo of cylindricality.
Once I do get it rolled up into some semblance of Aaron's example, it is a tricky business keeping it there as I slide the
string beneath it and try to tie. I tighten too much the first few times, and the cylinder gets pulled into a squishy U shape,
or the loop of twine just slips right off, knotting itself up in the process. I don't tighten enough, and the string comes
right off when I adjust the turkey to apply the second loop. Finally I get the pressure right, and get the first two securely
on. I start the short loops up and down the length of the thing. Again, squishiness is a factor. I'm not working with one
muscle as I was with the round, a muscle with its own logic and shape. I'm forcing a gruesome mess of chopped and torn flesh
into a logic of my (or Aaron's) own.
It's frustrating, improvisational work, a constant nudging and encouraging of meat to make it go where you want it. Turkey
is stickier than beef or pork, too, coats the twine in a sheen of slick goo that makes the knots catch unexpectedly before
they're tight enough. Lots of twine goes to waste, down the mouth of the garbage can; I try to hide this evidence of my failure
from Aaron, nudging bones on top to mask the frayed bits of string.
But when I do finally get everything tucked and secured and even, there's a different kind of feeling of accomplishment. I'm
not a sculptor who's found the face that was already there in the marble. I'm a trainer who's broken a wild stallion, neutered
it and rendered it safe for children to ride in circles around a dusty ring at summer camp.
After the first roulade, it gets easier. I adjust my prodigious tying skills to this new challenge, and soon I'm churning
them out at near-Aaron speeds. (Perhaps, in truth, even faster. I don't like to confess even to myself how competitive I've
become, and how inordinately proud of my little accomplishments. I guess even women are subject to testosterone poisoning.)
"That's pretty good-looking," Colin says.
"Thanks."
"Way better than mine."
"Oh, whatever." I'm glad he said it. I was feeling guilty for noticing, not without a certain glee, that in fact mine do look
a little better than his.
"You know, I was thinking," Colin muses, as his thick fingers perform the delicate knotwork. "I think every time I read the
word
butchery
from now on, it's going to piss me off."
"How so?"
"Well, you know, I read a lot of history. You know, military history. And I'll come across sentences about 'butchery on the
battlefield,' like
butchery
means something is bloody and messy and, I don't know, unskilled. And it offends me a little, frankly. Because butchery is
just the opposite of that."
I am coming to love Colin. "I know just what you mean."
"A thing of beauty, Jules," Aaron says, arriving at the table to retrieve two of the roulades. "Bag the rest of them when
you're done. We'll stick 'em in the freezer for later on."
"Yup." I whip out six more of the roulades before the day is out. Celebrate with a Mother's Milk. And an ice pack for my left
wrist.
I
KNOW
that Fleisher's is a magical place, of course. But after several months of day-in, day-out work there, the magic becomes
a sort of background glow, a happiness I don't have to think about.
Sometimes when we're walking Robert the Dog, some stranger will stop and exclaim, "My
God,
that's a big dog!" And I look at him and suddenly I'm seeing him all over again, and I think,
My
God,
he really is, isn't he?
That's what it's like bringing new people into the shop. What I've come to take for granted is passing strange to newcomers.
Just the case, bursting with bright heaps of meat, brisket and ground lamb and racks of pork chops and sausage and liverwurst,
is a source of wonder. When I pull open the door of the cooler in back by its great chrome latch, let visitors peer in at
the sides of pork hanging like clothes in a crowded closet, I myself see it anew--a perverse take on
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
I find myself thinking again something I thought on my first day here, that should I dare to press through all that closely
packed flesh, I would not be surprised to find some odd, thrilling new world on the other side.
"This is... amazing."
"That's good, right?" It's always hard to know how Mom is going to react to things, even though over the years enough familial
energy has been put into figuring it out to power a midsized city.
"I've never seen anything like it. It's... yes. It's good."
She, Dad, and my brother follow me through to the back of the shop. I explain about the salami closet and the sausage stuffer
and all the prepared foods made in the shop, the soup and roast turkey and pate and chicken potpie. Aaron and Colin are at
the table, and Josh and Jessica are both assisting Hailey and Jesse at the counter because the crowd there is building up.
Juan is bagging ground beef for wholesale orders in the city, ten-pound Cryovac bags he can now fill pretty reliably on gut
instinct, using the scale only to double-check. (Anyone who's ever worked a meat counter knows the oddly triumphant surge
that comes with putting the meat on the scale and having it hit exactly the desired weight on the first try. It's happened
to me once or twice, and I always feel like ticker tape should start falling from the ceiling and party horns should blow
in celebration. For Juan, though, it's a regular occurrence.) Though everyone is busy, they all accept with equanimity the
horde of meat-tourists trundling through the place. There are smiles and introductions all around. This is one way you can
distinguish between Fleisher's and your classic old-school butcher shop. There is a distinct lack of curtness.
"Your daughter rocks," Josh tells my mom. "She is so fucking cool."
"Oh!" My mother is not offended by the language Josh uses, to be sure, but she is just a tad taken aback by his enthusiasm.
"I know she is."
"You see this?" He forces me to make a muscle-boy curl and squeezes my biceps. "Hard as a rock."
"Oh, please." But although he exaggerates by a good long way, I allow myself to feel flattered. Under most circumstances,
to be seen by my mother like this, with my greasy skin and hat-head hair and flushed face showing its tendency toward rosacea
under no makeup and baggy T-shirt under white apron making me look even more like a sausage than usual, would have left me
feeling distinctly uncomfortable, even ashamed. But here in the shop, I find I don't worry so much.
"This," I say, opening up the front cooler and pointing at the large, untidy parcel, wrapped badly by me in butcher paper,
with my name written on it in black Sharpie, "is our Christmas dinner. I'm going to tie it up this afternoon. It is going
to be gorgeous. I promise."
I'm not in fact entirely certain on this front, but Aaron has assured me it will be a piece of cake. Well, we shall see. There's
still too much work left to be done at the shop for me to leave with my family. Once they head out with Eric--who's been waiting
outside with patient Robert--to find their cottage, I will set to work.
There are two racks of pork wrapped in that white paper--twelve rib chops in all, about fifteen pounds of meat and bone. I've
now learned how to do a crown roast, but this is happening on a scale some degree of magnitude beyond that of the dainty lamb
half-crown I made before. Chining, the first step, is something I've not yet become entirely at ease with; I let Aaron walk
me through it again. Unlike other, more straightforward uses of the giant scary band saw, with chining you have to improvise
as you go, adjusting the line of the cut as you see fit, rather than just anchoring the meat to the table and buzzing through.
I tend not to cut it as close as I really ought to do, out of hesitancy. Then I hold the rack by the ends and, just as with
the lamb, cut through the vertebrae between each rib, without cutting too deeply into the eye of meat behind them, to give
the rack the flexibility it will need if I'm to shape it into one half of a pork doughnut.
Next I have to French those rib ends. This I'm confident I know how to do, so I get out the spindle of twine, the cutting
glove, and my knife.
By the end of twelve ribs, forty minutes later, I've gotten to be a fair hand at the Frenching. (Yeah, I admit, that really
still just sounds dirty to me.) I often break the string as I tie and yank--even with the glove, my palm is red and pinched
from the string's bite--and more often than not I've allowed the gobbets of intercostal meat I pull off to fall to the floor
rather than onto the table, from where it would then go into the luggers for grind. But pull it off I've learned to do, and
I have to resort to scraping shreds messily with my knife on only two or three of the thicker bones. All that's left is for
me to tie the two racks together into a crown. I force each of them into a semicircle and, while Aaron helps me by holding
them in place, I tie them together. Same concept as before: loop around the corset of ribs; hold the twine taut with right
hand while looping over, under, and through with the left. Slide knot down, just a bit, then over, under, and through again.
Give the end of the twine a firm, even pull, pinching the knot in the left hand, until the waist of the crown roast is tightly
cinched. For a moment or two it's touch and go as the racks try to make a break out of the circular shape Aaron is forcing
them into. He holds firm, though, and I pull hard and tight, and in a matter of seconds it's done. The crown is about the
same circumference as a garbage can lid, the white rib bones splayed atop it, the eyes of the chops plumped out below like
a muffin top over too-tight jeans, if muffin tops were to be considered lusciously attractive. Gorgeous.