Once you get off the ribs, you reveal the brisket, treasured by Texans for barbecue and Jews for pastrami and Passover pot
roast. This is also not difficult to remove, though the first step, stripping off the cartilage-lined forward end of the rib
cage, isn't exactly a barrel of monkeys. The bone dissolves into cartilage, which is easily sliced into. You'd think this
would make it simple, but what it means in effect is that it's easy, when scraping your knife down underneath the knobby arc
to loosen it from the meat below, to inadvertently leave some inedible white bits embedded in the brisket, which you'll then
have to shave off.
Next stick your knife in just below the armpit (it's not called an armpit on a steer, I don't imagine, but for the sake of
the imagery), under the brisket muscle, and drag it horizontally toward the spine. Then make another, vertical cut from there
straight down the middle of where the ribs once lay, down to the next tier of fat. Then the brisket, too, can be peeled loose
with a good tug of the meat hook. Beneath that is a fatty layer in which is buried a small, long muscle that most butchers
disregard but that Josh has us roll out. He will later cut it into two-inch round pieces, roll each one in a strip of house-made
bacon, and sell them as "faux fillets" for eight bucks a pound.
Now we get to the pain-in-the-ass bit.
The irritating thing about a shoulder is that after all the work it takes to break it down--and I haven't remotely gotten to
the tough part yet--most of the meat is, while exceedingly tasty, not worth a great deal. Chuck eye, shank, brisket--all are
fatty, cheap cuts that need to be cooked a long time in a slow oven until they melt into fall-apart tenderness. The one exception,
and it is a bitch of one, is the clod. This piece lies atop the shoulder blade, adhering tightly to that triangle of bone
that looks nothing like any other bone in the body--a widening expanse of gray, shaped like a shovel's blade, to which the
meat ferociously fuses. The clod is quite valuable, not so much for the retail market as for wholesale; trendy New York chefs
buy it and slice it into steaks, roast it whole, even grind it for those high-end, thirty-buck hamburgers they all feel like
they have to have on their menu these days. And they want it entire, a wide triangle of beef unmarred by errant knife strokes.
So this is where it gets really tricky. I stand, just staring down at the shoulder for a moment. "Okay, Aaron? This is where
I need some help."
"Flip the whole piece over, first of all. So the foreleg is on top." The thing is damned heavy, and cumbersome. It takes some
doing to turn it. Once I do, Aaron reaches over and palpates the fat and meat with his thumb. "Feel right here," he says.
Sure enough, there is a distinct thin run of bone slicing straight through the flesh like a shark's fin through water--the
ridge of the shoulder blade, set at a ninety-degree angle to the bone's flat wedge, which widens and thins out into cartilage
toward the side of the cut facing toward us. The ridge runs from the blade's upper point, where it meets the shank, down to
nearly the bottom of the triangle, where it shrinks to nothing as the bone peters out into cartilage.
"Start there, with that," says Aaron. Then he gestures with his knife, indicating a triangular shape from along that line
up to the joint and then over, along the length of the shank bone. "This is the money cut. So don't screw it up."
"You do realize, right, that I've had three different people show me how to cut out the clod, some of them several times,
and every single time, I swear to God, they've done it differently?"
"That's good! If you learn different ways to approach it, you'll figure out how the thing really works. There's a logic to
it. Figure it out, and you'll be able to butcher any animal on your own. You can butcher people once you figure this out."
"Whatever. I like rote learning."
"Go ahead. You'll remember as you go."
I start by exposing the top edge of the blade bone, moving down carefully so the knife doesn't meander off track. All the
way up to the joint and then over, along the line of the shank. I've now outlined the edges of the clod, what I'm to pull
out. I dip my knife back into the cut I've made to the ridge top and work my way, so carefully, down, along the right side
of it. From the lower edge of the chuck, facing me, up to the joint, I meticulously loosen meat from bone.
Now, if I were Aaron, I would hook my left forearm under the upper tip of the clod, hold the blade bone down to the table
with my right palm, and rip the muscle off in one manly swoop, cleanly breaking the tight bond, leaving the blade bone bare,
the muscle untorn. The sheen of the silvery layer that fused the two together would come away with the meat, rendering the
surface of the clod smooth and dry, as if covered in wax paper. It's one of those little miracles of butchery, the expert
tearing out of a shoulder clod.
I, however, am no Aaron. I give it a try--a wrenching pull, as I clasp the meat to my chest--but I haven't the strength, or
maybe I just don't have the nerve to use it. The clod comes up a few inches, then catches, hung up, threatening to rip. Still
applying upward pressure so I can see into the crevice I've started to open, I stick my fingers in there and push with a windshield-wiper
back-and-forth motion against the tight edge of that fusion, feeling for the points that are resisting. With my fingertips,
I urge them to give. A knife would be quicker, but far messier. I want to do this right.
"How you doin' there?"
"Okay. I'd rather be slow than destructive."
"All a balance, Jules. All a balance."
"How very Zen of you."
Laboriously I pull up, then dig in, pull up and dig in, working the muscle loose bit by painful bit. It's half an hour before
I get the thing mostly up, so that only the cartilaginous hypotenuse of the blade bone is still attached to the meat. I hold
up the clod with my right hand, and with my left I fumble about for my knife without looking, which (if I thought about it
for two seconds I would realize) is seriously stupid but is something I've become very used to doing. Once I have it in hand
I use it to break that last connection--a small bit of cheating I can live with. The bone beneath is as smooth and gray as
an overcast sky.
"Christ," I whisper as I at last drop the clod onto the table. I'm sweating.
"What's your time on that? Got four more chucks back there to do."
"I'm working on it, I'm
working
on it." Out of the corner of my mouth, Indiana Jones style. Grumbling playfully so as not to grumble in earnest.
The other bad thing about chuck shoulders is that once you've gotten the clod off, a satisfying but exhausting achievement,
there's still a ton left to do, most of it tedious. The neck bone, complicatedly buried in the meat, has to come off to get
at the chuck eye. Inevitably a lot of flesh will come off with it, which later will have to be trimmed away, shred by shred,
in among all the knobs and crannies of the vertebrae, which, you will find yourself thinking, are just entirely too fussy
and clearly designed by nature as a sort of posthumous "fuck you" from steer to butcher.
Rolling out the chuck eye is sort of fun, as all cuts with a good, sticky, easy-to-follow seam are, but then I have to crack
off the shank, breaking into a
really
tricky joint that it sometimes seems I will never be able to penetrate. Once I do, and push down hard, there is that lovely
pop as the joint opens, then the obscene slow drip of clear synovial fluid. But the meat of the leg, once pulled off the bone,
is threaded through with thick sinews that must be shaved out. The rest of the meat--and there is still a lot of it--just goes
into the grinder. But before that happens, the remaining bones have to be pulled out, and a thick chunk of fat buried between
muscles, which you might think you could just carelessly chop up, has to be removed, as it is riddled with glands. The glands
are fascinating to look at, shiny, rubbery nuggets, gray or deep burgundy or occasionally green, but they are things you definitely
do
not
want popping up in your hamburger.
Finally, finally, I finish. It's taken me a solid hour. Aaron has broken down three in that time. "Good Lord."
"There's one more back there," Aaron says, grunting a little as he pulls his clod loose. "Want me to go get it for you?"
"No, I can handle it." In truth I'm not sure that I can. Chuck shoulders weigh about a hundred fifty pounds, and they're awkward,
with no convenient way to get a solid hold on them. But I have just taken more than an hour to break one down, and I'm not
about to ask for any coddling at this point. I head back to the cooler.
Sometimes the chucks are hanging off hooks from bars, which makes getting a grip on them marginally easier, but I'm not in
luck today, for this one is sitting on one of the Metro shelves, at just about thigh level. Conscientiously bending my knees,
I squat in front of it, force my arms under the shank on one side and under the backbone on the other, and start to lift.
It's a close thing. I very nearly make it, nearly get the weight of the thing balanced just right. But at the last minute,
just as I'm about to straighten my knees, it goes wrong, I topple, fall onto my back, and the chuck is now protected from
the floor by my hips, on which it's heavily resting.
Crap.
I will have to call for help, of course. But for a long while, I don't. I lie there, my bones grinding into the floor, contemplating
the laughable fate of dying under a mountain of beef. The funniest part is, this is really not such an unfamiliar position
I find myself in.
"Er... Juan?" No one will hear me back here behind this insulated steel door unless I shout. Juan is the person I am least embarrassed
to have to ask for help, he is completely without the supercilious gene, and besides, we have a shared history of cooler accidents.
Some months ago, I was in here with him, helping him arrange an alarming surfeit of meat. Four thick steel rods rested on
the top shelves of two Metro units pushed up against either wall, and on them were hung side after side after side of pork,
beef shoulders and rounds, lamb. It was a deeply overcrowded walk-in closet of flesh. Juan, being both smaller and stronger
than I, was three rows deep in the stuff, pushing bodies around, when a harsh, shrieking crack made us both glance up at the
rods overhead. We assumed that they were beginning to give under the weight. But it was worse than that. The Metro--industrial
shelving units designed to bear thousands of pounds--was bending, sinking, swaybacked under the rods like it was melting. "Um,
maybe you should--" But Juan was already scurrying out from under the meat curtains that were starting to shift ominously.
He got out seconds before the things started giving way, pork and beef tumbling down with slow, collapsing groans. It was
an awe-inspiring sight, like watching a tall ship sinking after a disastrous naval engagement, masts smashing one by one,
hull wrenching apart, splintering.
"What the
hell
is going on in there?" We heard Jessica bellow. But until she swung open the door, we didn't answer, just stared at the destruction,
the completeness of it, not yet even beginning to contemplate how we would go about picking up the pieces. "Well, you got
out from under, at least."
"Wow."
"Yeah." I ogled the devastation. Almost reveled in it. What now?
"Wow."
So, yeah, Juan and I have shared a moment. He's the one to call.
"Juan? A little help?"
By the time Juan gets me out from under the chuck, racks of ribs, peeled off the shoulders, are beginning to pile up next
to the band saw. I'm no longer afraid of the saw. In fact, I rather enjoy it, the efficiency of it and the noise, the electric
smell of singed bone. Without being asked I begin to saw the racks into two-inch strips, across the bones, for short ribs.
Of course, there are many, many things I love to eat. Liver, as I believe I've mentioned. The occasional Skittle or Cheeto,
sad to say, does tempt.
But short ribs are perhaps my very favorite thing to eat. Maybe along with oxtail. Now, there's favorite, and favorite, of
course. An exquisitely aged strip steak, of the kind Josh and Jess sell at Fleisher's--from a beast raised on grass and just
a bit of good grain, living a life as pleasant as a steer's life can be, aged for three weeks until the flesh is buttery and
the meaty flavor is concentrated to an almost unbearable degree--is a rare pleasure (at twenty-five bucks a pound it ought
to be rare, anyway), sexy and indulgent and rather like being in bed with a man who does things just right, without being
asked.
But short ribs contain a different kind of intimacy. A clandestine close-to-the-bone-ness. And so much fun because they're
sort of a secret. I mean, of course if you eat in the best of restaurants, you will see that short ribs have popped up all
over the place in recent years, so it's not as if these fatty, unctuous, glorious squares of bone and fat are my secret alone.
Chefs and cooks and butchers, the tribe of people invested in the selling of meat and the feeding of people for money or love,
all adore short ribs. We love them because they're cheap, and because cooking them, while an investment in time, is the simplest
thing you can do for the greatest reward. Bought for little more than a song, then simply left alone in an oven to braise
for hours in wine or stock or beer, they come out glorious, the sort of food that leaves one feeling nourished not only in
the gut but in the mind. You will feel as afloat as you do on a glass of good wine--not Margaux '66 divine, just
good
wine, the wine you need on that particular happy, cold night. And whether you're a chef trying to get your patrons to enjoy
themselves and pay as much as possible for the privilege, at the least cost to you, or a woman who wants her friends and family
to eat well, feel good, and be impressed for not much effort, short ribs are the way to go.
A N
ICE
, S
IMPLE
W
AY TO
M
AKE
S
HORT
R
IBS