DIY Butchering

The thud of heavy knives bashing bones, the splat of dead muscle hitting the table, the twisting of heads off bodies and the tearing of flesh from limbs. Is this a preview for Saw VII? An autopsy? No, it’s actually the scene at a home kitchen near you, as more and more Americans are taking a do-it-yourself approach to meat. It’s part home economics, part politics and at least part fad. And it’s changing the way many of us eat meat, chop by succulent chop.

Some of the younger pioneers of this culinary trend may not realize that for much of the past century, butchers, like milkmen and iceboxes, were a mainstay of American culture. The rise of supermarkets in the 1960s and ’70s and the general decline of blue collar trades throughout the postwar years contributed to the near extinction of the retail butcher — that gruff but lovable lug in a white apron who stood behind a counter and cut up steaks to your specifications. Back in the day, you knew him as well as you knew your baker and, yes, your banker. Butchers mattered in people’s lives; they were part of the food-supply chain. Almost all of them are gone now, and they’re not coming back.

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But the service they provided is, thanks to recession economics and a growing desire on the part of consumers to be more engaged with how food makes its way onto their plates. At specialty shops like the Meat Hook in Brooklyn, N.Y., hipster parents and earnest “gastronauts” attend lessons in how to cut up animals. A few hours away, in the tony Hudson Valley, Fleisher’s offers one-week introductory butchering classes four times a year (for $2,000 a pop). Taylor’s Market in Sacramento, Calif., often sells out the tickets to Danny Johnson’s three-hour butchering demos, where a “light lunch” is included — for those who can stomach it. “Danny makes it so easy to understand,” says Paulette Bruce, 56, a p.r. consultant and teacher who, after taking a class in January, now routinely breaks down chickens and grinds her own burger meat. “I’m going to go back and take more classes.”

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Bruce’s enthusiasm is common to many who take up the art of cleaving. First of all, let’s be honest: home butchers get to feel superior to everybody else. They have unbeatable street cred among foodies. Second, for people who are trying to make ends meet without sacrificing quality or taste, utilizing lesser-known cuts or breaking into new animal choices like rabbit or goat beats resorting to Hamburger Helper any day.

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Then there’s the emotional satisfaction. Julie Powell, who defined a generation of food bloggers with her book Julie & Julia, has published a sequel, Cleaving, about chasing her sorrows away at the carving block. But home butchering also has a decidedly macho element that appeals to today’s emasculated males. Henpecked hubbies and coddled urbanites are the ideal recruits for home butchery, through which seemingly any milquetoast can become a Grizzly Adams with a single blow of his cleaver.

(Watch TIME’s video “From Julie & Julia to Julie with a Cleaver.”)

But striking that perfect blow, sexy though it might seem, is not easy. Home butchering ranks right up there with assembling an Ikea cabinet — or rather, disassembling one — except it’s a good deal messier. Even if you wimp out and have someone else do the slaughtering, you still have to bring a dead animal into your kitchen. It’s an unnerving experience. Small animals, like a baby goat or piglet, will still be bigger than you expect, and their legs and lolling neck tend to go where you don’t want them. And there are more tendons, more joints, more mysterious sources of resistance than you anticipate.

When professionals butcher an animal, they make it look fairly simple. They slip a small knife in the natural seams of the body — like between the ribs and at the knee joint — and they know just how much pressure to exert. You don’t. Your spouse is grossed out; your children are horrified. And the heavy Henckels cleaver you got as a wedding present demands far too much skill and certitude to help you out here. The key weapons in your arsenal — a 6-inch (15 cm) boning knife, a small hacksaw, a meat hook — seem outmatched. The first time you try hacking through the neck and feel the bone merely splinter, you start to get a sense of just what you’re up against, how much physical work and deep inhibition.

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The difficulty is worth it, though, for the movement’s adherents, who — all the sillier aspects aside — are wary of factory farms and an overstressed environment. “You don’t get into butchering animals because it’s cool,” says Seamus Mullen, 35, a chef who often serves dinners at his New York City restaurant, Boqueria, from animals he has raised, slaughtered, butchered, prepped and cooked himself. “Animals give their lives to feed us, so it’s on us to eat every part of them. It’s a form of respect, and it’s a better way to live than just treating meat as a disposable commodity.”

Most of the great chefs his age have taken a similar attitude, and the concept of “snout to tail” cookery, popularized by the British chef Fergus Henderson, is an ideal many if not most young cooks aspire to.

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To them, serving up a basic lamb rack or strip steak seems as weak-minded and cynical as giving someone a red box of candy on Valentine’s Day. They’d rather give you the braised hoof, preferably accompanied by some ostentatious form of grits.

But then, they’re pros. It’s hard for rookies to take a hacksaw to a limp, cold leg splayed out across a counter or to face the dead, accusing eye of a lamb. But once you get past the strangeness of it, the virtue you feel from home butchering makes the physical effort seem worthwhile. As for the trendiness of it all, I beg to differ with Mullen on one point: there’s definitely something cool about whacking a carcass with a big knife. There just is.

Got Cleaver?

See more of Josh Ozersky’s Taste of America food columns.

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