Sleep With Your Butcher. And Maybe Your Bartender.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
— J. R. R. Tolkien
There is no better way to maintain your place on top of the food chain than by having an intimate relationship with your butcher — or, for that matter, your produce guy, your bread baker, your cheesemonger, maybe a spice gal, and a local pastry prodigy.
In fact, can you name five local food shops with which you do business? If you can’t, then you are probably not part of the sustainable food movement. These relationships are intimate and nurturing.
Take the butcher. He or she is, after all, the gatekeeper, the last stop between you and the meat you put in your mouth. And when you think about it in those terms, do we have to explain just how important a relationship that is?
Think about just how much can go wrong during a casual hookup with a butcher you hardly know: When you are eating his ground meat, are you sure you know what you’re getting? Does the meat come from some sad and horrible place?
Perhaps his technique leaves something to be desired. Perhaps he doesn’t know just where your pleasure center lies — or doesn’t care. Maybe his wife likes her pot roast dry and well done and it has made him bitter. Maybe he has you confused with Mrs. Jones down the street who shops only on price point, or Frannie from Scarsdale who has to be convinced that there is Angus something or other in her burger meat, even though she couldn’t tell a Big Mac from the burger at the Four Seasons if her fur coat depended on it.
Just the way you choose a life partner, choose your butcher wisely. And then get close to him or her and learn the secrets. Don’t be afraid of intimacy. Shake that fear of commitment! Be emotionally available to your butcher, because he (or she) has needs, too. He lives to please you with his bone-in strip and his immaculate flank steak, and if he is a good butcher, he’ll have great ideas how about how to cook them, things you might not have thought of: Flank Steak Mephisto Style or the proper way to do Pork Chops Murphy.
He knows where the meat comes from, he can steer you away from inferior choices and toward the best product. Be his confidant and never again will you hear “I’ve got some lovely lamb chops” when all he wants to do is dump tired inventory.
And after you’ve been with him a few times, he will know your taste. No more fumbling foreplay with the London broil, and even the simplest assignation can turn into unexpected pleasure.
Last Saturday night when I was looking for a skirt steak to throw on the grill for a casual Sunday-afternoon barbecue just for two, my butcher Emile motioned with her finger and asked me to help her out. “I’ve got two nice shell steaks here, much better than the skirt. They’re gorgeous, and I’d love to get rid of them so I can start in on a fresh cow Tuesday — do me a favor, take them home, you won’t be sorry.”
It was hard to say no to the lady who double-cuts my pork chops without having to ask (they always look like something straight out of a Dr. Seuss book), and sure enough, the difference in choice seemed to evaporate when I got home and discovered that some particularly toothsome Basque sausages had leapt into my bag, and that the shell steaks were extraordinary. Just as in love, openness and willingness to take chances are rewarded in those magical little ways that make a relationship special.
And when you are done romancing the butcher in the morning, you should think about getting together with the cheesemonger, who will make the wine you buy from your independent wine merchant so much more worthwhile, and then, when cocktail hour strikes, your favorite local bartender.
Don’t be a one-stop shopper. You should consider patron- izing a local florist, a baker, a pastry shop, a fishmonger, a vegetable stand, a gelato truck. Spreading your dollars over many small businesses and encouraging independence is a key to the sustainable food movement. Hell, I married my cheesemonger and life has never been better.
But my relationship with my bartender is romantic, too. He just looks at me and knows what I need. When I need an energy boost, he knows to mix me the perfect Negroni, just the way I like it, and when he is onto a new concoction, he shares it with me, he tests his newfound mixology on me and my pals — friends-and-family style — and we all leave soused and just a little bit wiser.
This isn’t the model for a free-love utopia, this is about beating down the market forces of commodity and building a community. I’ve said it before — what could be more intimate than putting something in your mouth, whether it’s pink like a veal chop, or sweet and wet like a domestic vermouth. Be loyal to those who give you the real love, and you will enter a dome of locally sourced pleasure that Coleridge could only have dreamed of.
Excerpted from The Carnivore’s Manifesto: Eating Well, Eating Responsibly, and Eating Meat by Patrick Martins with Mike Edison, published by Little, Brown and Company. Copyright 2014 Patrick Martins and Mike Edison.
Buy The Carnivore’s Manifesto at Amazon / B&N / Indiebound / iBooks.
