What Brought Me Here--Part I

Today we are making sausages—Beef Stix to be precise.  The Saturday after Thanksgiving is a painfully slow one.  A large tub of ground beef and seasoning sits on the counter waiting to be mixed.  I don elbow-length green rubber gloves.

            Burt tells me, “There’s a trick to it; hold your arms out.”  He sprays both sides of the gloves with Pam.

            I say, “Excellent,” a la Mr. Burns as I tap my fingertips together maniacally.

            “You’re scaring me.”

            “I scare my boss at my other job, too.”

            “Yeah, but we have knives and stuff here,” he replies.

            “I import my own knives to my other job.”

            This does not at all surprise Burt.
            I dig right in, mixing the ground chuck and the special house seasoning; but the gloves are huge, and keep slipping off, staying in the meat when I go to pull my hands out.  At one point I have to stop because I am laughing so hard.

            Once it’s all mixed up, the grind goes into the sausage stuffer, a.k.a. the Dick Machine.  Again the gloves get stuck in the mash while my hands come out bare.  Then I punch the meat all the way down to force the air out so there are no bubbles in the sausages.  Put a casing around the phallic nozzle (which peculiarly resembles sliding on a condom), screw the lid on, and start cranking. 

You have to hold the casing tight as the meat is pumped into it so it’s not all loose wrinkly skin.  We use silicone casing—still edible, and keeps better than intestinal casings.  My first attempt is not full enough, but the second comes out perfectly.  I can only crank the sausages out so far before it becomes too hard for me to handle, and Max takes over.  If you let go of the crank, it will snap back and smack you right in the kisser. 

Then you mark out eight inches on the table, pull the length of sausage from left to right, measure, and twist.  Scoot the length of sausage down again, measure, and twist.  Rinse and repeat . . . and repeat . . . and repeat.  Because the recipe is for 25 pounds of meat.  Once these long tubes of meat are twisted into links, the sausage is draped over metal bars and smoked until they reach 156̊ F.

I secure the door to the smoker and set the timer just as Burt comes back.

“I remember the day you first came in here and talked to us.  You just . . . wanted to do stuff.  You left and I thought . . . really?”     

 

(The Dick Machine)

 

So where did it all come from?  How did I become interested in this?  How does a seemingly sane young woman one day up and decide she wants to play with animal insides on her days off? 

This is something a lot of people have asked me since starting this apprenticeship.  Well, it’s a long story (hence the “Part I & II”).  The bitchy answer is:  I don’t know; why do you like the shit you like?  The short answer is:  I love food, and it’s something I want to know more about.  That, and I don’t ply a trade, I don’t have a “craft” . . . aside from writing—which I’m (obviously) not really very good at, and which will not keep me alive during the zombie apocalypse. 

I am of course joking, but The Dream is to one day live someplace where I cannot go to the store and purchase a package of pre-cut meat.  One day I want to raise my own food and know how to process it from start to finish.  But why does that interest me?  In case you haven’t noticed, I’m slightly obsessed with the primal, with the things in life that remind us that we were once (and many of us still are) animals—basic needs like sustenance, shelter, sex—things that connect us to our ancestors, our roots . . . not across space or distance, but across time.   

            This stems from my love of food, my love of cooking.  I developed a curiosity for how it works, where it comes from . . . but where did that all begin? 

            About four years ago I broke my foot playing soccer and had to have surgery on it, which required an extended convalescence on my couch.  I quickly learned that there is nothing on daytime television worth watching.  I was burnt out on the Home & Garden channel when I came across the Food Network and Travel Channel, and recalled watching those Sunday mornings with my mom when I was home from college.  But during the week they aired different shows—shows I’d never seen before. 

And this is where I encountered the lively and irreverent banter of Anthony Bourdain, the hilariously unhealthy and maternal Paula Deen, the adorable husband-wife team of the Neelys, the sweet and classical Barefoot Contessa—who looks very much like my own mother—the refined and methodical Giada.  Later on came other favorites Anne Burrell and Ree Drummond. 

I was an initial fan of Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee, but soon grew tired of the “gimmicky” shows, also realizing that Sandra Lee’s idea of replacing certain fresh ingredients for store-bought not only costs more but needlessly detracts from the taste profile of a recipe, all to shave off a few seconds of time because she thinks we’re too lazy to grate our own cheese.   

But when I was growing up, there was no fresh-grated cheese in our kitchen, we used dried herbs in a bottle, and the only thing I knew of garlic was the difference between the powder and the salt.  Saturday morning breakfast was pancakes from a box mix or a big bowl of microwaved scrambled eggs.  We live, after all, in the age of convenience, and my parents had three children to feed—a feat I can’t even conceive of. 

When I moved out and had to feed myself, previous forays into the world of cookery included:  a bunch of stuff! . . . thrown in the crock pot!; noodles! . . . from a box!; red potatoes! . . . cubed and sautéed in butter and garlic powder for a really, really long time.  I knew nothing of deglazing a pan, nor drying meat before browning it; I’d never even heard of Extra Virgin Olive Oil, and hardly ever used salt because it was “unhealthy.”  One time I was feeling fancy and wanted to make steak in a red wine sauce, so I pan-fried a steak and then poached it in red wine for a few minutes until it turned purple.  Obviously not my finest hour. 

So anyways, I started trying recipes from the Food Network chefs, using ingredients I’d never used before (Fresh basil!  Cloves of garlic!), making things from scratch that I always thought just came in a box, taking old recipes and substituting fresh ingredients. (Never again will I use that bile in a plastic bottle shaped like a lemon.  The nerve of grocery stores, putting that in the produce section!)  I asked for a set of knives and a knife block for Christmas; read Kitchen Confidential; started growing herbs on my kitchen windowsill; watched Julie & Julia; read Julie & Julia; started buying my meat from a butcher, my vegetables from a farmer’s market.  I was becoming more connected to The Source.  These were my first baby steps away from the pre-packaged insta-food most people “cook.” 

I discovered not only that I was good at cooking, but I liked it.  I block off my entire evening to cook a meal—put on music, open a bottle of wine . . . I don’t just cook, I feed myself.  I love that it’s both an art and a science; like a mad Carl Sagan (or Alton Brown) I add a teaspoon of this, a quarter cup of that, watch how the ingredients react in forming my wicked concoctions, tweak the measurements, and jot down the results.  There is a never-ending fountainhead of knowledge in the field of cookery; there will always be Ferran Adriàs somewhere out in the world to challenge our conceptions of what can and can’t be done with food.   

All of this only fueled my curiosity rather than sated it.  I remember the exact thing that made me want to learn more about meat cutting:  it was the first time I made Ina Garten’s Engagement Roast Chicken.  Before this, the only chicken experience I had was pre-packed thighs or breasts from the grocery store; I’d never taken on an entire bird before.  Ina instructs the cook to liberally season the chicken inside and out with salt and pepper, and it was while I was performing this simple task—rubbing my bare hands in every crevice of this animal, under the skin, becoming intimately acquainted with my food as I never had before—that was when I knew.  I wanted more in my relationship with food.  And then I pulled this beautiful, golden, juicy bird out of the oven, and had no idea how to dismember it to serve it.  I think I got the legs off and just left the rest of it whole and sawed bits and pieces off over the next few days. 

Then I read Cleaving, the sequel to Julie & Julia.  I already possessed a borderline disturbing love of pork (a good friend once told me my love of pork was “unsettling yet intriguing” and offered to let me borrow his blow-up “sex pig” given to him as a gift), steaks that erred on the rare side, and a penchant for knives, so the autobiographical tale of a woman who quits her mid-level government bureaucrat job to apprentice at a butcher shop quite intrigued me. (I could do without the descriptions of her marital infidelities, all I cared about was meat.  MEAT!)

(End Part I)