It's been a pleasure to meat you

There is something profoundly comforting knowing that someone knows you well. Perhaps it is linked to the subconscious realisation that they know you well and still choose to associate with you…or perhaps that’s just me..?

Anyway, for me, when someone close to me does something right up my street, bang on my button and hits my jackpot (no, that wasn’t a euphemism for anything you foul beast), it gives me a strange sense of security. Being known is one step closer to being understood, and being understood is inextricably linked with being connected with another. And the search for connections with others is a universal, eternal instinct in all humans.  

Opening my birthday card from The Boy back in April was a faceful of said security. My present was a butchery course. I do gormless very well on a normal day, but in that moment, I did gormless to a whole new level. I think for a moment he thought I was staring at the card because I wasn’t happy with its contents.

Oh dear Boy, how very wrong.

When I worked in a restaurant, it was a fish restaurant, and I was a pastry chef. I did learn about fish, but the meat all came prepared. A butchery course, aside from the macabre attraction of slicing and dicing animal anatomy, had always been something I thought would be immensely useful. As food prices rise, being able to buy a whole joint of something and zorro it up into its smaller cuts definitely helps, and then there’s also being able to present a cut of meat well.

The course I attended was at The Butchery Ltd, in their headquarters under the railway arches in Bermondsey. They run numerous courses focussing on one particular animal, but this was a megamix of meat: Butchery to Pimp your Home Cooking. Over three hours we jointed a chicken, a leg of lamb and a whole shoulder of pork. Wait. It gets better. We got to take it all home. Anything we wanted from our class, we could have. Bones for stock, just the meat, both, neither, all. Everything.

A frenzy of meat.

There were just three of us in the class, run by the co-owner of the company, Nathan Mills. He and his partner came over from Australia around 8 years ago, having grown up in a family of butchers. To hear his journey from when he arrived here to owning his own company would make even the most hardened name-dropper blush. But he reels off the names as if they were average Joes, not because he’s arrogant, but because to him they are precisely that, average Joes. Just people. Jamie Oliver, Barbecoa, Whole Foods, Smithfields, Borough, Raymond Blanc, Angela Hartnett – they’ve all had or are in line to get a piece of his meat. (AGAIN, stop being so dirty. No double entendres.)

Not to my surprise, my fellow rookies were male. Nathan confirmed my suspicion that there aren’t a vast amount of women in the butchery business (in the UK at least). I can appreciate why – my “little piggy” required both hands to lift it, and then there are the cows in the walk-in fridge. Close to 90kg each.

Hmmmm. I can’t imagine being over successful trying to move one of those alone.

Nathan took us through the cuts with ease and explanation, but not over-complication. He helped when we struggled, but never took over too soon – we wrestled and we stabbed and we probed and we cut. And only if we really started to hash it up did he come to our rescue.

With the chicken, we removed the breasts and marinated them in cloudy apple juice, garlic, sage, chilli, rosemary and thyme. I hadn’t ever thought about apple juice as a marinade for chicken, but I can honestly say, having cooked them last night, they tasted wonderful. We had also removed the legs, which I poached last night, and with the carcass I obviously made some stock. Roll on risotto, please and thank you.

With the lamb, we removed the bone and then butterflied the meat out for barbequing. Well, he is Australian. That had a simpler marinade of a splash of oil, lashings of garlic, thyme and rosemary.

And for the finale, we had the pork. We removed the ribs and numerous other bones that I dare not name for fear of getting them wrong, but lots of bones we did remove. And then we butterflied the joint, layered up outrageous quantities of garlic, sage, rosemary and thyme, and then rolled the beast.

It was at this point, having finished the work with knives, that Nathan advised a glass of wine may help. Not as a marinade for the meat, but for us before we tried our hands at tying the joint up. So, glasses of red in hands, we watched as Nathan demonstrated slowly, twice, how to tie the joint up.

Hmmmm.

The Eyebrow was most certainly raised.

Deep breath. Big gulp. Off we go.

After much laughing and invention of new and interesting knots never seen before, we all finally got there, and before we knew it we were scouring for anything which we could roll up and tie.

With our spoils we then vacuumed packed whatever we wanted, Nathan tidied up, and we sat down together to a light dinner of fantastic bread, cheese, smoked venison, and sterling British hot-water crust pies. We were even treated to a visit from Nathan’s partner, who is the office machine behind the company, and their 16 month old daughter. The conversation ranged from how they got to where they are now, to amusing accounts of other class attendees (doctors) reconstructing the carcasses they had only just carved up in perfectly accurate anatomical way, and onto the whys and wherefores of Ebay and antique meat slicers. Food, of course, was at the core of it all.

As I struggled out with two very heavy bags of flesh, I had that grin again. The same type of elemental, profound grin caused by knowing I am known, but this was caused by knowing that there are people out there who know about what they do, and who want to share that, whether through classes or by offering the best product available. And I suppose again there is that sense of having connected with the course, Nathan, the other attendees. With gifts like that, with butchers like them, and with evening courses like this, the world can’t be all bad, can it.