Pig Day

“I’m here to see Foster about a pig.”
            “Then you and me got the same problem, sister.  Foster ain’t here.”
            Shit.  I took off work to be here; and I just put two hours worth of quarters in the damn meter. 
            “Have a seat and I’ll talk to the other cooks; want something to drink while you wait?”
            “Sprite please.  Thanks.”

            My friend Foster is the head chef at a downtown pub that gets sides of pork in every four weeks.  About a month ago I was hanging out with his sister, telling her that Foster is my hero—he was recently featured in a local magazine as one of five young chefs around town to keep an eye on (I’ve followed him to the various restaurants he’s worked in for the four years since I’ve known him).  The picture of him that they published showed him hacking away at a pig with a four-foot hand saw, several other pig half-carcasses splayed across the long stainless steel table before him, innards up.  This is my version of porn; I’m just too shy to tell this to Foster in those terms.  So Foster’s sister told me to get in touch with him if I wanted in on the next pig day.  First Thursday of the month he told me to be at the pub at 2pm.  So I was.  And he wasn’t.

        
            The daytime bartender was very friendly, chatting with me—asked me where I worked, so I told him about the shop.
            “Isn’t that Burt’s place?”
            “Yeah!”
            “And does his crazy-ass brother work there, what’s his name?”
            “Max.”
            “Yeah, Max!  That guy is out there.”
            “He’s a trip, that’s for sure.”
            The front door opens and a figure walks in, silhouetted by the sunlight outside.  Male, average height, glasses, curly hair framing a round face . . . it’s not Foster, but this is a familiar personage.  As he passes me with a quick glance, he casually says, “Hello, how are you today?” as though addressing any nondescript patron.
            “Doin’ good, Beano, how are you?”
            He does a double take, stops in his tracks.  “I thought that was you!”  It is Ben, one of the owners, brother-in-law of a girl I went to college with.  “What’re you doing here?”
            “I’m supposed to help Foster with the piggies, but he’s not here.”
            “No shit; where the hell did that come from?”
            That . . . is a long story.  I give him the short version (the long version to be published here very soon, I promise):  “I just got way into food over the last few years; I’m working at a butcher shop now.”

            The farmer shows up, but still no Foster.  The bartender asks me if I’m going to help them load in the pigs.

            “I don’t know, can I . . . can I do that?”
            “I wouldn’t, those things are pretty heavy.”
            One of the cooks emerges from the kitchen with a rolling rack.  “Here, you can use this.  Leave your stuff behind the bar.”
            So we head out front to the truck, parked on a busy street in downtown St. Louis because there is no back door, no loading dock.  Cars, buses, and pedestrians flow past us as the farmer hands us four plastic-covered pig halves from the back of his truck.  The two cooks each take a half over one shoulder, and I get one on the rolling rack.  As I’m pushing it into the pub, some random on the street asks me what I’m going to do with that pig. 

“Cut it up,” I say.

            “Are you a butcher?” he asks.

            “I hope to be,” I reply.

            “Woman with a knife . . . scariest thing I can think of.”

            I say nothing, but think, Oh good, does that mean you’ll stop talking to me now?  Just how I like my men . . . they’re so cute when they’re terrified. 

            Once all the pigs are loaded in, the two chefs and I stand awkwardly in the kitchen.  They were not expecting me, but I get the feeling that it’s not unusual for outsiders to take part in Pig Day.  I introduce myself.  “Is there something I can do to help and not be in the way until Foster gets here?”

            The chef named Adam answers, “Um, well, let’s get you an apron, and you can take the plastic off while I try to get a hold of Foster.”  He hands me a knife.  “Try not to get too much brain on you.” 

I go in the back room—the same room where Foster’s magazine photo was taken—and cut the pigs free of their packaging.  These pigs are 200 pounds apiece, which means each half is about 80% of my total body weight.  They are hairless and perfectly split down the middle; the only remaining organ is the kidney.  No eyes, but brains and tongues cling to the insides of the skulls.  When I return, Adam is on the phone, “Want me to get her started on trotters and tenderloins till you get here?  Okay; later dude.”  He looks at me, “Ready?” 

            “Sure.”

            “So are you familiar with the parts of a pig?”

            “For the most part.”

            “I’m not used to teaching this stuff.”  Then he adds sheepishly, “Pig Day is my favorite day.” 

            He starts out by telling me about what they do with the pig parts in the restaurant; they make head cheese and rillettes (which I learned is like pâté—just meat whipped into submission until it’s soft and spreadable), brine some things, freeze others.  Adam informs me that the best piece of meat he’s ever found in a pig is hidden just behind the eye socket.  The walls of the room are plastered with recipes for curried mayonnaise and other sauces; I tried to memorize a few but alas, I became more preoccupied with other things.  The corpses splayed out on the stainless steel table beckoned. 

The first thing we do is remove a huge strip of fat from inside the pig, then the kidney, tossing them in grey buckets at the end of the table.  Adam says, “The Amigos usually take the kidneys.”  “The Amigos,” I come to learn, are the Mexican line cooks. 

            Next is the tenderloin, which is a long thin piece on the inside of the ribs.  You take your knife, angle it up, and stick it in between the meat and the top of the ribs (which in this case is the center of the spinal column since we’re working with half of a pig), and just cut it away, little by little, until it’s separated at the top.  Then (and this is NOT the French way of doing things but it’s a lot faster) you take a cleaver and scrape the back of the tenderloin off the ribs. 

Now most of it is separated except for the tail end, which goes down into the pelvic bone.  So you have to cut down into the pelvic bone to get as much of the tenderloin out as possible.  You start a small cut with your knife, then stick your finger down in it to spread the cut, as well as feel your way along the bone so you know where to continue cutting.  I watch Adam do this for a bit:  knife-finger-knife-finger . . . then I say, “Stop.  Hang on.”  I take his knife hand away from where he’s working, and stick my finger in the hole he’s opening up so I can feel what he’s feeling and know what it should feel like when I’m doing it.  I say, “Okay,” take my finger out, we look at each other for an awkward moment, nod our heads, and continue.  When you’re finished cutting about a four inch hole all the way around the tenderloin, you just dig the knife in and cut it off as deep as you can.

We split up and remove the tenderloins from the other pigs.  As I worked on my first one, the other chef who helped us load in comes back and watches me delicately and slowly peeling the tenderloin back.

He scoffs, “You look like you’re afraid to hurt the pig.”

I immediately correct him, “I’m afraid of taking off too much of this expensive meat.  Me and the guys at the shop argue about this—I think they’re knife happy.  They throw pieces of meat into the grinder that to me look like whole steaks.” 

While I’m working on the last tenderloin, Foster walks in.  It is 3:30.  Adam says, “Dude, she’s motoring on these tenderloins!” and I quietly swell with pride.  Foster is a large, bearded, gruff individual, especially for someone so young.  When he talks, he sounds kind of like Ken Hudson Campbell, who you may remember as the chubby guy from Armageddon who describes how to make haggis during his psych eval. 

Things move much more quickly now.

Trotters—pigs feet—are simple enough:  you move the hoof and feel around for the knee joint, then take the hand saw and cut the leg off just above the knee joint.

Adam comments, “Once you realize that it’s not hard . . . well, it’s not hard.”

Next we move on to the head.

We flip the pigs over so they are innards-side down.  First the jowl must come off.  To acquire this much-coveted face-bacon, one must first squish the cheek around a bit to feel where all the fat is.  Then you make a semi-circular cut around it all, starting at the base of the chin, swooping around towards the neck, then up underneath the eye.  You want to go maybe an inch and a half deep, where you find yourself inside this pocket of glands surrounded by fat, and then you just slice, slice, slice until it comes off. 

Foster and Adam show me a different way to hold my knife, with my thumb and forefinger on the actual blade, like real chefs, and I like that a lot better.  You feel . . . closer to what’s going on . . . more in control . . . more like a part of your knife.

That’s all for the head, so now you just saw it off and toss it in The Amigos’ bin. 

I should point out that Foster is flipping and turning these things like they’re rag dolls; I can slowly inch mine around on the table, but I have to get both arms underneath it, leverage myself, and basically straddle the pig’s head to get it moving. 

Next we sawed the hocks off—which is just more of the leg—above the knee and below the hip joint.  The hand saw and I don’t get along very well; my arms are too short and I have trouble getting the right angle in the close quarters of the kitchen’s back room. 

Then you have to jiggle the front hoof (I guess stub is a more succinct term since there’s no more hoof) around a little bit to find the shoulder blade.  Use a scimitar—a long blade with a slight curve to it that’s narrower near the handle and wider on the end—to make a semi-circular cut around and underneath it to separate out the shoulder (aka Boston butt).   

All of these muscles are very easy to pull apart; some you don’t even need your knife for (well, I do; Foster doesn’t).  Once you get a muscle started, you’ll notice little white whispy things called membranes all around the cut, and if you just gently run your knife over those things, snipping a little bit at a time, the meat comes apart quite effortlessly.  The animal sort of tells you where to cut.  Adam says, “It’s almost as if the pigs want to be pulled apart.”  And I remind him that our muscles are the same:  they are delineated and held together by seams, the very things that make them easy to pull apart.  Julie Powell (once again) describes this much better than I ever could, and it’s a truly great metaphor—the glue that holds us together is also the very thing that makes us easy to tear apart: 

So.  Between any two neighboring muscles, be they housed in a pig, a steer, or, one presumes, me, it turns out that there is a thin layer of connective tissue:  clear, threadlike, easily cut.  It looks rather like what would happen if you rubber-cemented two pieces of pink construction paper together, then pulled them apart again before the rubber cement dried.  I don’t know what this stuff would be called by a biologist or a doctor, but in the meat fabrication biz it is called a “seam.”  Seams seem (seams seem, heh) magical to me; they are what give butchery its best chance at grace.  If you know what you’re doing, you can peel two muscles clean apart, smooth and untorn, with the tip of a five-inch knife, or even just with your fingers.  I go along painstakingly, but as I pull up on the cap of meat with my right hand, all those clear connecting threads show the seam’s path. . . . I’m rather mesmerized by the slow, easy peel.  Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart.  It’s actually rather moving, though I know better than to try to explain why aloud.  It’s sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.

—Julie Powell, Cleaving (2009) 

Then the belly:  cut parallel with the ribs just below where the shoulder blade was, go about 2 inches down until you hit ribs, then peel/cut along the ribs, pulling the belly away from them.  Since all the belly meat has been removed from the ribs, they can’t be used like you would normally cook a rack of ribs.  Adam Frenches some of them, quick and rough; the bones will be used for stock.

I watched Foster take a ham off, but didn’t get to do one myself.  He made a semi-circular cut around the pig’s butt, peeled and sliced and pulled through until the pelvic bone was exposed, then dug down into the pelvic bone, stuck his knife into the femur joint and twisted to pop it out, cleanly exposing the round white top of the femur bone.  He said that move works best with a broken-off boning knife (I thought he was going to break his knife off in that bone). 

So now you’re left with ribs and a spinal column, and the last thing to do is saw them apart.  The loin (as opposed to the tenderloin) is the large chunk of meat left attached to the ribs.  Once they’re separated, the loin will get cut into bone-in pork chops.  Foster makes me take off the vertebrae, and patiently holds what’s left of the carcass still for me as I slowly get through it . . . one—rib—at—a—time. 

            “And you just broke down a pig,” Foster concludes.

            Adam chimes in, “She stuck her finger in my pig hole!” (officially my favorite quote of the day).

            We stand around and shoot the shit for a little while; Adam mentions that he was cuddling with his girlfriend the other day and couldn’t help pointing out to her where her tenderloins are.  I smile and say, “I do that too!  I totally do that to people and now no one wants to go camping with me!” 

It’s refreshing to talk with people who are as excited about meat cutting as I am; I don’t think there are very many of us in the world.  These guys possess a passion in what they do; a passion that Tommy lacks, simply because butchery has been a job to him for so long.  Foster and Adam came into it through desire and vehement study; Tommy was born into it—maybe even felt it was forced on him—and has never known anything else.  Burt’s passion is cooking, which is why I really enjoy learning from him, but it’s butchery that really turns my gears and gets my heart palpitating.  People ask me if I missed my calling; I say “No; I found it.”

            Foster tells me that I can come back and help them any time; they’ll be getting lamb in soon for the holidays and they’d love to teach me more.  On my way out, I run into the owner again, and he asks me how it went.

            I high-five him as I say, “I took that bitch down!”  (I’m bringing back high-fives; they’re underrated and far superior to fist bumps.)

            Beano told me that I don’t have to wait for pigs to come back, that I could come by and just hang out with him some time. 

            The whole drive home I couldn’t stop smiling.  Pig Day is my favorite day.