Eating for Beginners Read online

  "There are so many things we have to do to get ready for winter," Lucy said cheerfully, pouring coffee into a thermos and handing me a cup. I glanced at the outdoor thermometer through a clear spot in the iced-over window. It read just slightly above ten degrees—a toasty eleven, perhaps.

  "Let's go get the goats," she said. "It'll be warm in the milking room."

  We put on our boots and extra socks and gloves and hats in the mudroom next to the kitchen and headed to the barn, while Oliver donned his insulated suit and went off in a truck to pick up the wood. It was completely dark and our feet thudded on the frozen ground. The thought of the warm milking room—where we would drink the coffee Lucy was carrying!—kept me going.

  Pushing open the side door to the barn, we went inside, and I waited for a blast of warm air that did not come. The milking room was warmer, perhaps, but not warm. I guessed it was about thirty degrees in there.

  "I need coffee," I whimpered. Lucy took one look at me and poured in a hurry.

  As we drank from our mugs—and as I pressed mine to my face, trying to thaw my cheeks—Lucy gazed out the window pensively. "I have to say I'm looking forward to getting some real snow. If it's going to be this cold there might as well be a beautiful landscape."

  And though she was going to have to spend hours out in the snow with the animals, as I looked across to the foothills in the distance, I could see her point. We downed our last sips and got to work.

  By seven-twenty-five I had put out grain and water for the goats, my feet felt like blocks of ice, and I had been hit in the head by a bale of hay Lucy threw down from the loft. It seemed like a decent start to the morning. We brought in the goats—a blur of fur and hooves through the side door again—and then it was time to reel in the cows.

  After another long series of calls—stubborn beasts!—we got them into their pen and Belle into the stanchion, milk bucket hanging from the leather strap around her middle. Louise came next. When there was enough milk to fill two big plastic buckets, Lucy asked me to take it over to the chicken coop and feed the calves.

  Opening the barn door with my foot, I set out across the cow pen with a black bucket sloshing in each hand. A light snow had begun to fall and I crossed as quickly as I could, nodding to Wink on my way through the cow lounge. When I set the buckets down in the calves' pen they stuck their big heads into them immediately and started drinking. While they were sucking the milk down, my mind drifted to Jules, who would surely have loved them and all the other animals in the coop. In my mind, I could hear his little voice singing "E-I, E-I Donald," his version of "Old MacDonald."

  Back in the barn, I discovered Lucy dashing back and forth between rooms so she could simultaneously milk cow number three and two goats.

  "Do you want me to take over the goats?" I asked hesitantly. In spite of my small success the previous day, I still felt completely unqualified, but I also felt like a jerk standing around doing nothing.

  "Okay," she said. "Are you sure you want to?"

  I nodded and headed for the milking room. Humming along with the radio that was playing in there, I milked the goats two by two. I liked feeling them press against me when I opened the gate and watching them speed across the barn and onto the platforms. I liked the variations of their fur and the sound of the milk hitting the steel pan. I liked the goats themselves; they were silly and altogether good company.

  In this way, two more hours passed, and it was nine-forty-five when we got back to the kitchen for breakfast. I could hear Lydia talking on the telephone in the living room. Lucy made oatmeal, and as the two of us sat down at the kitchen table, I asked her what she thought about the trend of eating local food. She corrected me: "I don't think it's a trend. I think it's the direction we're going and it's good for everyone."

  Oliver, who had just unloaded a massive pile of wood at the back of the house, stepped in to shake the ice off his beard and eat some breakfast. When he heard what Lucy was saying, he agreed. "It's rare these days to be only one person away from knowing an animal personally, but anyone who eats our animals is affected by us." After seeing the way Oliver and Lucy treated the animals, I knew I'd much rather put my trust in farmers like them than in a corporation, regardless of whether the grain they used was organic. (As David had once put it while we watched Oliver bringing in the animals at applewood, "He walks in with carcasses over his shoulder and I think, 'I'm happy to eat that. I have no problem eating that.'")

  I knew it wouldn't always be possible to be choosy—at restaurants or out on the road. There are times when you just have to eat, and if one of those times turned out to be the moment when Jules first decided to try any kind of meat, I wasn't going to stop him no matter where it came from—but I also knew what I was going to choose when I could.

  Then Lydia came in. The wind was blowing fiercely outside, bringing thick clouds with it, and she was in full-on preparation mode. "I get antsy when there's a big snowstorm coming because you don't see the ground from now until April," she said. "You have to learn to have special glasses so you can see ahead to what's going to get covered by the snow sliding off the roof. Things get frozen into the ground, ladders and pails, and you don't even know the ladder's missing until you can't find it." She was also keeping an eye on the weather forecast for Oliver's deliveries on Thursday and Friday. Fancy Meats had never failed to deliver, but in really bad weather they had been delayed until Saturday, and she was hoping that wouldn't happen again.

  Lucy had to feed the sheep, Oliver had to bring wood inside, and they were all running out of time for final pre-storm organization, which made me realize it was a good moment for me to head back to my family and get out of New England before the snow hit. I said my goodbyes, then stopped in the bathroom on my way out. As I was washing my hands, I noticed a framed poem hanging above the sink. Handwritten in red ink, it read:

  Ah, when to the heart of man

  Was it ever less than a treason

  To go with the drift of things,

  To yield with a grace to reason,

  And bow and accept the end

  Of a love or a season?

  —ROBERT FROST

  If this had been a gift to Lydia, the giver must have known her well. The strongest impression I'd had of her over the last few days was that she did not give up easily, whether to illness or to a winter storm.

  Waving goodbye to Rocco and Alba, I raced away down the road, just ahead of the clouds, but the poem stayed in my mind all the way home. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to apply to all of the farmers I'd met; they were all fighting against obstacles—financial, governmental, weather-related—to do the work they felt they were meant to do, and they all seemed to revel in that work despite its risks and regardless of how they had come to it. As Lucy had told me, "To be a farmer in our generation—well, one thing that hasn't changed is that you have to enjoy hard work and be willing to do it."

  ***

  Later that week, when Oliver came to the restaurant to deliver the animals, we greeted each other like old friends. "It was so cool milking the goats," I said.

  "You were pretty good at it," he replied, as he walked toward the basement steps with a lamb over his shoulder. "Lucy thinks you're a natural."

  Sometimes the best compliments are the ones you never imagined you'd want.

  I headed back into the kitchen, where David passed me carrying a big pot containing a calf's head Oliver had delivered, which I realized might very well be Wink's.

  Since I no longer had any hope of avoiding the truth about meat, I decided it was time to learn about butchering. Later that same day, when Greg had one of Lydia's lambs on the counter next to garde manger and was hacking through its bones and tendons and separating the various parts into fish boxes for later use, I paid close attention.

  Greg saw me watching. "I used to own a small grocery store," he said. "I bought half cows and butchered them hanging, which is much easier."

  It was?

  Greg moved
on from the lamb to a veal hind. Technically, it was a quarter of a calf (also possibly Wink)—basically part of a torso, a hip, and one leg, with the skin and the hoof already removed—but I imagined that many of the half-cow-butchering principles applied. First he removed the clumps of fat, which had turned an opaque whitish-yellow in the cold. Then he took out the kidney, a shiny brownish clump, and set it aside.

  "Do people eat that?" I asked.

  "Yes, with lemon," he said, making an ecstatic face. "But not here."

  "So what are you going to do with it?"

  "Maybe make it for myself for lunch." He giggled and turned back to his work.

  He made a gentle slice along the veal's backbone to remove the tenderloin, which ran along the inside of the spine, and pulled the meat, a pale brick red color, away from the bone with the tip of his butcher knife. When it was free, a thick rope-like piece, he put it on a baking tray. Then he removed the strip loin, which ran along the outside of the spine and looked very similar to the tenderloin. These two pieces of meat would be stored in canola oil to seal them against the air and cooked on the grill for dinner service. The breast, which he removed next, scraping it from the ribs, was a thin, floppy piece that would be grilled that morning and ground up for meatloaf or for hash to be served at Sunday brunch.

  "I once took off a veal breast, grilled it, and ate almost the whole thing," Greg said to me, rolling his eyes with a look of combined pleasure and nausea. "Ohhhhh..."

  There were some scraping and sucking noises, the knife hitting bone and the meat coming away from cartilage, as he cut around the top of the hip to loosen the leg. Then it was off, the ball joint of the hip disengaged from its socket and exposed, a bluish-white orb in the middle of the red flesh.

  Greg folded the spine into three sections with his huge hands, cracking it, and put it in a roasting pan to be used for veal stock. Then he started to break down the leg for dinner service. "You follow the white stuff," he said, pointing out the connective tissues, when I asked how he knew where to start each cut. As he ran his knife along these dividers, each muscle of flesh came loose with a moist sucking sound.

  When all the meat was off the leg, he separated the knee, another, smaller ball joint. Then he went to the back of the room and returned with what I was sure couldn't possibly be a hacksaw but was, in fact, a hacksaw. He used it to cut through the shank bone so he could fit all the leg bones into the roasting pan with the spine.

  In about forty minutes, he had transformed the big, unwieldy, sinewy veal hind into a stack of neatly portioned meat for dinner and a pan of bones.

  Then he brought another lamb up from the walk-in, and I realized the veal had been the easy one. At least it hadn't had a head.

  The lamb had been skinned, but it did have its head, which meant it also had eyes. And teeth. And a rigid liver-pale tongue hanging out of its mouth.

  But not for long. With one stroke of Greg's big knife and one quick twist, the head was off and in the trash (there was already plenty of lamb stock in the walk-in, so this head wasn't needed). Even with just the head missing, the lamb looked less like an animal and more like meat. Its flesh was a paler pink color than the veal.

  Greg began with the legs, inserting his knife at each hip joint, twisting them off one by one, and setting them aside on a baking tray. Only the hind legs had enough meat to use on the grill; the forelegs were for braises. Then he progressed as he had with the veal, removing the tenderloin and strip loins for dinner service and separating the breast meat from the rib cage with gentle swipes of his knife. The breast meat would be used to make either merguez sausage or lamb torchon for the charcuterie plate.

  Inside the rib cage, when all the breast meat was off, I saw, instead of the awful sight I was braced for, a beautiful pink-ribbed tunnel in the shape of an inverted heart, almost shell-like in its translucency. It was momentarily shocking to see something of such delicate beauty in the midst of all the torn meat and bone.

  Greg pointed toward the lamb legs on the baking tray and said, "Why don't you try one?" I lifted a hind leg off the tray and turned it over and over, as he had done, looking for a point of entry.

  And over and over and over. Meanwhile he was slicing into another hind leg easily; it almost seemed to be coming apart in his hands of its own accord.

  The two-foot-long haunch in front of me seemed impenetrable, but finally I located a line of white tissue and put my knife in. My chopping skills had improved, but this was a completely new task and I felt as if I had never held a knife before. While Greg's knife glided and barely seemed to touch the meat, I was sawing away and making ugly ridges in the smooth muscle.

  "It looks so easy when you do it," I said hopelessly.

  "You follow something, always," he repeated, gesturing to the bones and tissue. "It's not like you're guessing where to go." That made one of us.

  Concentrating with all my might, I managed to get one leg done in about the amount of time it had taken Greg to cut up an entire animal. The knife seemed to do the opposite of what I wanted with every stroke, and I was suddenly grateful that I could buy my meat already cut up, even if there was an ounce of denial involved in doing it.

  There is no denial, though, in removing goats' heads, especially when you may have recently been introduced to the goats by name in a barnyard. It isn't possible when you're trying to twist off the head as a pair of glazed-over eyes stare up at you blankly and the sounds of cracking bone, sucking meat, and whirring saw fill the room. When your hands are much too small for the job and you find them slipping and sliding and look down to see that the top of the goat's head has been opened and you can see its brains. When you give up on the twisting and instead try to bend the neck back to get the head off, and when that doesn't work, take a hacksaw to the goat's innocent young neck and slice right through it with a skreek-skreek noise and a grinding sound.

  This "you," by the way, was me.

  Having completed this task twice, I watched Greg take apart the goats I'd beheaded in the same manner he'd dealt with the lamb. Then I elected to turn my attention elsewhere because the young pig he was about to cut up weighed the exact same amount as I did, and I found it perverse. I had seen enough body parts for one morning.

  But I was now on a meat high, and the next logical step was to try my hand at the grill. I had conquered fish, and I was ready for something new.

  At five o'clock, after learning how to make roasted sunchokes and cauliflower flan during prep, I presented myself to Sarah, who fixed a kind, appraising eye on me. "Okay. Let's try some temp meat."

  Temp meat?

  Working the grill was not even remotely like working fish. The heat level was different (read: a thousand times hotter), the order in which you cooked was different, even the vocabulary was different. Temp meat turned out to mean meat cooked to a specific temperature: rare, medium-rare, medium, well done. You let meat carry over, you braised, you stewed. There was also the vegetarian entrée. My months at the fish station, mere inches away from Sarah and the grill, seemed to have had no effect on me. I'd had blinders on when it came to everything except fish, and now I was feeling lost all over again.

  "Even if I'm crazy-ass busy, I try to be ready," Sarah said, wiping her counter efficiently and stuffing her side towels inside the top of her apron, where she liked to keep them. "Whoever's on fish is running the show. I don't really know what's going on."

  Which left me where, exactly?

  "You're ordered in on two lambs with fish!" David called from about four feet and a world away at the fish station. Sarah bent down to her lowboy.

  "What about the sides?" I asked, panicking for no reason since that night I was not responsible for anything other than staying out of Sarah's way while I watched her cook. "On fish, you do sides first."

  "Meat is different," she said patiently, standing up with a stainless steel pan full of oil and pieces of lamb. "It has to rest, so you put it on the grill as soon as it's ordered in and then worry about the rest."
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  She plunged her gloved hand into the oil and pulled out a long lamb loin, plunked it down on her cutting board, wiped it off, and sliced off a section to cook before putting the rest back into the oil.

  "Ugh. Disgusting," she said, wiping up dribbles of oil every which way and rubbing her hands on her apron. Then she salted the meat and threw it on the grill.

  It was not a hugely busy night, but I felt as if my head were wrapped in cotton wool. I struggled to keep track of Sarah's movements and learn her process. When an order came in, you portioned, salted, and cooked the meat immediately, stretching your arm out over the intense heat of the grill to poke it for doneness and watching the sides for the "creep" where the color of the meat changed as it cooked.

  While it was on the grill you got the sides going, by which time there was usually more meat ordered in that had to be portioned, salted, and placed on the grill, after which you poked the original piece or pieces of meat again and, when they were done, quickly removed them to the rack with tongs, which heated up the second you reached over the grill with them, so you had to snatch quickly. You checked on your sides, and when a dish was fired, you checked the corresponding portion of cooked meat sitting on the rack to see if it was still hot enough. If it wasn't, you put it back on the grill, confusingly near all the other meat that was on there by now, to warm up a bit. Before plating, you cut the meat into even slices about a quarter of an inch thick to be laid on the plate over or alongside the sides, unless you were plating a braise, which you scooped out of the pot and into a big bowl before adding the sides.

  While I was watching Sarah do all this flawlessly, and cooking the occasional order myself when it wasn't too busy, David told a story about working at a restaurant—he didn't say which one—when he was high on something, back in the days when he still did that kind of thing. "It got so I was turning from the stove to the counter and I couldn't even remember what was what anymore," he said, imitating his dazed, drugged state. Only the tiny shred of consciousness I had left after sweating in front of the grill for hours, trying to switch my brain from fish mode to grill mode, stopped me from saying out loud that I felt that way every time I cooked, no drugs or alcohol necessary.