Cleaving Read online

  I wanted a life of

  Blue skies shining

  Diamonds and lusty

  Spring shadows.

  I have an apparatus

  To produce sausage

  JUAN IS teaching me how to make the Italian sweets. We’re together in the small room at the back of the shop, hardly more than a pantry-cum-broom-closet, that is Juan’s domain. The meat grinder, a stainless-steel contraption about five feet tall, dominates the room. The meat goes into the big bin on top, the bottom of which slants toward one end. Inside that is a hole not unlike a sink disposal, which houses the grinding apparatus. Below, on one side of the machine, is an opening over which Juan has fitted a metal plate dotted with holes, like a large shower drain. He and I are both standing on coolers on either side of the receptacle, up to our elbows in meat. Meat and ice. The meat is in chunks, perhaps five inches long by three inches wide, emptied from huge Cryovac bags marked “Pork Trim” that we toted in from the cooler. The ice is from a machine pushed into a corner of the kitchen. I’m not sure what the reason is for the ice, but it must be mixed in thoroughly.

  I HAVE terrible circulation. It’s one of those little niggling health things that has bugged me my whole life. When I was in high school, a bunch of us used to go to a place out near Wimberley, Texas, called the Blue Hole. As I remember, it was on private land, but whoever owned it had set up a slightly shabby park, with outhouses and rope swings over the river. The water wasn’t exactly blue—Texas water, in general, tends more to the green—but it was as cold as all get-out, something to do with springs in the riverbed. I remember one specific time when my friend Paul suggested a trip, a little earlier in the year than was customary. It was March, I believe, which in Texas is an extremely tempting month—sunny days, cool evenings, bluebonnets. It’s one of the best months Texas has to offer, actually, and how many places on the planet can say that March is a highlight? But in truth, even in Texas March is really too early for swimming in frigid spring water. We went anyway; we swung into the breathtaking water with manly fortitude, we splashed around and cursed and showed off like the kids we were, and then I got out… and I was blue. I mean blue. Not pale, not waxen. Blue. Like, as Paul said at the time, “comic-book-villain blue.”

  THE MEAT and ice mixture is ten times colder than the Blue Hole. I’m sure this could be proven scientifically, but lacking the necessary instruments and travel stipend I will rely instead upon the aqua shade my hands are turning.

  “How on earth do you do this?” I ask Juan.

  He just shrugs. “Yeah, it’s cold, right? Put your hands under warm water.”

  Well, that’s a good idea.

  Except, Jesus, that hurts. Christ. Feels like my hands are going to fall off. Once the initial burning wears off, though, my hands are at least working again. I don a pair of gloves and go back to work. Juan is now grinding the meat. This is the easy part. He pushes a big button, and the meat starts going down the grinder, spilling out through the plate below into a white plastic lugger set on top of a third cooler. It snakes out in pink coils that make me think of some macabre child’s toy—Sweeney Todd’s Play-Doh Barbershop®. I return to my place atop the cooler and nudge the meat down toward the grinding apparatus—rather gingerly, because it turns out I have a bit of a phobia about all things that grind, fantasize about fingers caught up and drawn bloodily in.

  So I’m a little wimpy in my efforts toward getting all the meat down there, but down it all goes, eventually, into the grinder’s gullet.

  Once the meat has finished slithering out, Juan pushes the button again to stop the machine, then shoulders the lugger of meat—seventy-five pounds of it—and dumps it right back into the grinder’s metal bin. I add another couple of scoops of ice and stir it around while he switches out the plate at the grinder’s mouth with another just like it, but with holes about half as wide in diameter, then pushes the big button again. And again we push the meat through, grinding it finer, and then one more time, using a plate with smaller holes still. Then once more the meat goes into the grinder’s bin. This time I add to it the spice mix Juan measured out before we got started: a two-gallon container full of fennel, sage, garlic, salt, onion powder, basil, parsley, and white pepper. Burying my arms deep again, I churn the pork, now a sticky puree, until the spices are evenly blended in. Meanwhile, Juan is replacing the latest metal plate with a spigot, perhaps seven inches long, wider at the base than at the end. When he sits on the cooler in front of it, with the lugger in front of him between his spread legs, the spigot points squarely at his collarbone.

  From a plastic Tupperware container, he lifts from milky water a length of pork middles, a category of sausage casings, which of course are just meticulously cleaned intestines. “Middles” are, obviously, the middle section of the intestines. Casings are also made, for larger sausages like those big dried salamis, out of lower intestines of pig or lamb or steer. These are called “bungs,” which is a little lacking in euphemism for my taste.

  Juan finds the end of the casing and blows lightly across it, as you’d blow on a bag off the roll in the supermarket produce section to get it open. The casing is several feet long, thin and pale, translucent. Once he can hold it open with two fingers, Juan bunches it onto the spigot, up to the base, with a quick back-and-forth motion that is embarrassingly recognizable.

  (Jessica recently said, “Men always make the best sausage makers. They’ve all been practicing the necessary motions since they were twelve years old.” And I, still so vulnerable, my skin as thin as some amphibian hatchling, had another of those flashes that come so often now, to a lazy afternoon interregnum: “So if you define adolescent hell as the period between the moment you realize exactly what it is you want to be doing”—his mouth moving unhurriedly down my flank toward what he wants to be doing—“and the moment you first have the opportunity to do it, I was in hell for five long years. Being ten sucked. I managed to keep myself entertained, of course…”)

  I shake the memory loose as Juan finishes getting the next casing on and pushes the grinder’s button. Meat starts shooting down through the spigot’s end, filling the casing, the whole length of sausage spilling in a thick coil down into the lugger, helped along by another back-and-forth motion of Juan’s, opposite the first, that encourages the casing off the spigot and, stuffed with meat, into the bin. Juan is an expert sausage stuffer, and so he knows, just by eyeing the rate at which the folds of the casing he’s crumpled onto the base of the spigot unfurl, when to stop the grinder. Still, inevitably, after the last of the casing comes off and falls, a final burst of pink pork ooze spurts out of the spigot, which Juan catches in cupped hands and dumps back into the top of the grinder before he slides another casing on to start the process again.

  Okay, it’s true that since we broke it off I’ve had D, and sex, on the brain a lot, so maybe I’m more inclined to read into stuff. But surely it’s not just me, right? “Wow. That’s—”

  Juan just grins and nods. “Yeah, I know.”

  Well, glad I’m not the only one.

  “You should make blood sausage some time.”

  “Blood sausage? You do that?”

  “Only once or twice. My mother told me how to do it, last time I was home. I’ll show you sometime. With the blood filling especially, the casings look, I don’t know, veiny and…” He makes a gesture, holding his thumbs and forefingers into an O of expansive girth while blowing out his cheeks.

  “Okay, okay. Enough!”

  I have no problem with sausage making, don’t care about snouts and lips and assholes. (Though I know Fleisher’s puts nothing in its sausage but good clean meat and fat.) But at this moment, I think I’ll never be able to eat sausage ever again, no matter how delicious, without feeling in some little part of me that I’d rather be engaging in one way or another with D’s penis. I know, that is so terribly crude that I, not exactly a prim person, cringe to write it. But then, that’s making sausage.

  Once Juan has turned the seventy-
five pounds of pork into a great looping bin full of sweet Italian sausage, he puts it in the back cooler to rest. Later we will twist the filled casings into four-inch links. But first we take a break to warm our hands on some coffee mugs.

  We lean up against the shelves in the kitchen, shaking out our numb fingers and listening to Juan’s mix CD, a combination of Latino pop and Nashville country. Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow” is playing. We’re not saying anything. Juan and I tend to talk in bursts, just small stuff mostly. We’ll talk music. As a Texan living in New York, I have relatively few opportunities to discuss country music with anyone outside of my immediate family. Or I’ll ask him to sniff a burst Cryovac bag for his opinion on whether the meat in it has gone bad.

  (Juan has the most trusted nose in the shop, which is a dubious honor, since it means he’s the one people come to holding out a thawed turkey by splayed legs, saying, “Smell this.” Perhaps associated with that, he’s also the best taster around. Every day Fleisher’s serves a soup of the day, and Jessica and Juan share responsibility for making it. Once Jessica was pulling together a beef stew, sort of making it up as she went along, and something was definitely missing. She and I both tasted and discussed, suggesting this or that ingredient to add that extra needed punch. Then we called in Juan. He took one spoonful, literally said “Aha!” with a finger in the air, and proceeded to boil a small pot of water, drop four dried guajillos into it, then immediately drain them, pound the softened peppers to paste in a mortar, and stir it into the vat of soup. The result was smoky, spicy perfection.)

  But he’s also a guy in whose company it is very comfortable just to be quiet. Which is what we’re doing now, until suddenly Juan chuckles.

  “What is it?” I ask, smiling in expectation of a funny anecdote.

  And he starts telling me a story. It takes me a few seconds to catch up with what he’s saying. Juan speaks completely fluent English, but it’s accented enough, and he is soft-spoken enough, that occasionally I miss a word or two. Anyway, he’s talking about walking a long way in the cold, and at first I think he’s talking about walking to work.

  (What I was thinking of was: I once overheard Josh asking Juan if he had a winter coat. “I’m getting you a coat. It fucking kills me thinking of you walking to work in this weather without a real coat.” This from a man who had, not ten minutes earlier, cacklingly locked one of his employees into the cooler for fun.)

  So then Juan says something about stopping in the middle of the night for a couple of hours’ sleep, and I’m slowly beginning to understand what it is he’s telling me and I am obscurely embarrassed, as if he’s sharing something with me more intimate than our relationship bears up to.

  “I woke up, and I was so, so cold, I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t feel my hands. Lying there, freezing, and I look up at the sky, and there are so many stars. It was beautiful. Now whenever I’m really cold, I think about that.” He laughs again.

  “Where was this?” I ask, not exactly sure how to respond to this disclosure, however casually bestowed.

  “Arizona, I think.”

  “The desert,” I say moronically, “gets cold at night.”

  “Yeah.”

  I have been secretly feeling kind of sorry for myself ever since the spurting sausage. Pitying myself for my flailing marriage, for my lost lover, for getting older and maybe never having sex again. And then Juan tells me his story about crossing the border in the middle of the night, an experience so arduous and uncertain and frightening that rich tourists pay money, this is true, to get a Disneyfied version of the experience. And he tells it with a giggle. It’s just what he has to do whenever he wants to visit his mother.

  And I think, I really ought to get over myself.

  JUAN’S MOTHER’S BLOOD SAUSAGE

  4 quarts unsalted pig’s blood, as fresh as possible

  4 cups finely diced pork fat

  About 4 tablespoons kosher salt

  About 3 tablespoons coarsely ground black pepper

  1 quart chopped onion

  1½ cups finely chopped jalapeño, seeds removed

  2 cups shredded mint

  A quart container of pork “middles” (from your butcher—ordered along with the blood and fat)

  Kitchen twine, trimmed up into three-inch lengths

  Special equipment: a manual sausage-stuffing funnel, basically a metal cup with a nozzle at the bottom, either handheld or on a stand of some kind

  If the blood is not basically straight out of the animal, it will have congealed; reliquefy it with a blender, food processor, or immersion mixer. Then simply stir in the fat and all the remaining ingredients. It will be very, very liquid, and you’ll wonder how you’ll ever make anything solid from it. There is reason to wonder.

  Untangle a length of casing, maybe three feet or so of it, and bunch it up on the nozzle with the aforementioned up-and-down motion. Tie the end into a knot and reinforce by knotting a length of twine just above it.

  Over a bin or large baking pan, begin spooning the blood mixture into the cup of the stuffer, while with the other hand urging the casing off the nozzle as it fills. When the chunks of fat get stuck in the mouth of the funnel, push them through with the handle of a wooden spoon or something similar. This is all easier to accomplish if you have more than one pair of hands. Sausage making, like the activity it often resembles, is more fun with two people.

  Stop filling when you still have about four inches of casing left. While one person holds the empty bit up and pinches it closed, the other person will twist the length of sausage into links. About four or five inches from the bottom end, make a double twist, then reinforce it with a tie. Continue like this until you’ve divided up the whole length. At the top of the last link, make a knot with the end of the casing. The sausages will feel to the touch like, well, pig intestines filled with blood.

  Drop the length of sausages into simmering water and poach it for about ten minutes. This is tricky; keep the water at a very gentle simmer. After about five minutes, begin testing for doneness. Gently lift a link out of the water with tongs. First touch the surface; the sausage should have solidified. Then poke the sausage with a toothpick or skewer; the sausage is done when a puncture in the center of the link oozes clear juice rather than blood. Lift the sausage from the water and let cool to room temperature.

  In an ideal world, this recipe would yield about two dozen four-inch links of sausage. However, all boiled sausages are delicate, especially blood sausage, due to the liquid filling. You will lose many lengths to burst casings—which make a disturbing mess in the simmering water—and more to undercooking (you can fry up the undercooked links and use them as you might chorizo). But the ones that do turn out are lovely—spicy and rich, with the mint providing an unexpectedly refreshing note. You’ll find that you can live with the few links you have and not mourn too much over your mistakes.

  5

  Break Down

  “IF YOU CAN dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” I don’t quote Vince Vaughn movies, as a general rule, but this line pops into my head as I start in on my fourth beef round of the day. I’ve been working at the shop for a couple of months now, and I’m stronger than I was, but beef rounds still get me winded. After practicing on these buggers, going back to petite pig hindquarters will be a snap.

  Beef rounds are enormous things, and more obvious than some of the other primal cuts. There is no question that this is a hundred-pound ass-end of cow. They are obvious in other ways as well. They have lots of interlocking parts, but the pieces all have a pleasing distinctness about them. The muscles have simple shapes, like those games for very small children, with the plastic blocks in different shapes that are meant to be fitted into different indentations: top round, a circle; bottom round, a trapezoid; eye round, a cylinder; knuckle, a cone. Breaking down a beef round is splendidly clear-cut work, but, given the sheer weight of the thing, it’s also hard work.

  The wrist of my left hand, my cutting hand, is now
visibly thicker than my right, with muscle and also with chronic swelling. My left thumb has started to occasionally catch, just as my granny’s used to do.

  (She would pop it loose by rapping it sharply against a tabletop; when I winced, she’d cackle merrily. She might have been a manic-depressive alcoholic, but as all the women in my family know from personal experience, that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a sense of humor. Or that she wasn’t tough: her version of coffee was several tablespoons of Folger’s crystals dumped into a saucepan of boiling water, cooked down five minutes, then poured straight out into her one stained coffee cup. Oh, and though she smoked for fifty years and for the last fifteen years of her life basically lived on canned peaches, Pepperidge Farm cookies, Taylor sherry, and Neapolitan ice cream, she never had any serious health problems, except for the odd stomachache, and wound up dying at the age of ninety, mostly out of sheer cussedness.)

  Sometimes, after a day of hard cutting, the ache in my wrist keeps me from sleeping. My hands and arms are adorned with nicks and scrapes, mostly from the featherbones that bristle along the cut edges of the spines on sides of pork, thin shards that can scrape like hell. I find all these marks, like the ones D used to bestow, perversely satisfying, a coded diary of my experience. Josh and I have begun talking tattoos. His arms are heavily inked already, and he’s looking to accompany me when I decide what to get to commemorate my Butchering Endeavor.

  It’s a Wednesday afternoon, slow, so Jesse has joined me for a bit of knife practice. He normally works the counter, and so doesn’t get a lot of table time. He and I, junior butchers, toil away on the rounds while Aaron and Tom go after the chuck shoulders. Chuck shoulder is the most challenging primal to break down. Aaron and Josh and Tom will get into three-way tiffs over the best technique for doing it. For now I pretty much stay away; I certainly can’t yet navigate a shoulder without assistance. So I stick with rounds. The Jackson 5 is playing on Josh’s iPod. (Josh’s musical collection is something of a hoot—opera, sugary pop, Eminem, world music. My favorite, I think, is the album of themes from classic seventies porn movies. Actually really great, hummable tunes, with much amusing wakka chikka. And the sight of a bunch of butchers cutting meat to the theme of Debbie Does Dallas is not to be missed.)