BUTCHERY IN MARYLEBONE

As locavores look beyond shrink-wrapped supermarket meat, some are learning to wield knives of their own. Catherine Nixey reports from her first butchery lesson ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"Hold the knife like a psychopath," says Perry, handing me a large blade. I take the handle and obediently apply the Hitchcock hold. "Now plunge it into the thigh," he says, "And stop when you feel the bone." Lifting my arm high, I strike skin; then flesh; then bone. Perry nods his head in approval. "Vicious."

One doesn't often envision an evening of wielding knives and slashing thighs in Marylebone. One of London’s most chichi shopping streets, this area is better known for its boutiques than for bloodletting. But this has begun to change, courtesy of the Ginger Pig (pictured above), a local artisanal butchery shop. The shop started offering butchery classes on a weekly basis in 2007, but they proved so popular that they are now held every weeknight. It seems locals handle machetes with some enthusiasm.

Perry Barlett, a butcher at the Ginger Pig and our teacher for the evening, is clear on the appeal. "Nowadays people really want now to know where their food has come from," he says. "They want to know it has been properly made by a proper butcher. This is all part of that." It would to be hard to imagine a more proper butcher than Perry. From his bloodied apron to his broad forearms, he may be the Platonic ideal.

The students are a different matter. About us hangs the unmistakeably anaemic aura of office work. Aware of our fraudulence, we all avoid each other’s eyes as we wait, faintly embarrassed to be caught in the act of cultural cross-dressing. It is a relief when Perry appears from behind the counter to give us our white coats. We put them on. Milgram-like, they give absolution, and everyone immediately cheers up.

We begin with an anatomy lesson. Perry points to a pig carcass hanging from a hook by its translucent Achilles tendon. "Can I have a volunteer?" Everyone shrinks back. I raise my hand. Perry instructs me to lift the pig from its hook and place it on the table in front of him. As I approach the pig, I start to regret my enthusiasm: from nose to trotter it is easily as tall as I am. Clotted blood glistens inside its hollowed out neck. I pause. "Imagine it’s your boyfriend," says Perry, "and give it a big cuddle."

I wrap my arms around the pig and lift. It is extremely heavy; so heavy that I am unable to walk in a straight line while holding it. Pig and I waltz in an unseemly danse macabre to the great wooden butcher’s table, where with a final Fred Astaire swoop I lie my partner down. My white coat is now richly smeared with red. "You’ve been blooded," says a classmate approvingly.

My fellow classmates, though mainly male and middle aged, are from a wide variety of professions. This is typical. "We get all sorts here, bankers, lawyers, surgeons," confirms Perry. Do the surgeons make particularly good butchers? "No," he says, sadly. "In fact they’re worse. They’re always frightened about cutting into things." I find myself reassured, despite Perry's disappointment.

Before we are allowed to use our knives, Perry explains each cut of the pig. He points to every part of the animal and describes how best to serve it. "Loin... excellent with garlic and fennel... Trotters, perfect for pork pies... Back fat–absolutely excellent for sausages."

As I look at a bloodied trotter, I am reminded of Otto von Bismarck’s aphorism about "laws and sausages"–two things one should never see being made. This phrase could easily be extended to any piggy product. The pig’s legs feature burst violet veins just beneath the skin, like an old lady. The skin itself is terribly, pinkly human: more memento mori than meat.

Thankfully Perry’s brisk lesson leaves little time to wallow. Knives are handed round. All the men brighten and are soon sharpening their knives with dashing d’Artagnan swipes. Butchery proper begins.

As we go through the cuts, Perry explains how to spot signs that an animal has been ill-treated (too much fat here, too little there). One of the most poignant details is also the subtlest: tiny red dots on the flesh. Caused by burst capillaries, these indicate that the animal was in considerable distress when it died. "You see it all the time on supermarket meat," he says. "In all the years I’ve been here I’ve only seen it once." Despite his dark humour, he clearly cares for his pigs and only handles the free-range sort.

While we are sawing away, the door of the shop bursts open and a troupe of merry revellers enter, smiles upon their faces. As they take in our bloodstained group, knives and saws in hand, their smiles fade. "We thought it was a bar," they mumble, amid other apologies, and head back out. As the door slams, Perry shakes his head. "Happens every night," he says.

Though our inebriated intruders were clearly alarmed by the blood and guts, I am becoming increasingly less so. Cutting up a dead animal is certainly an unavoidable reminder that it was once alive, and as such can feel callous. But, as Perry’s lesson shows, acknowledging these animals’ mortality is far less callous than ignoring it, as the sterile protein packets served in supermarkets allow you to.

The remainder of the lesson is spent preparing, cutting and seasoning our own cut of meat to take home with us. As we do, prepared plates of pork that have been cooking throughout the lesson are brought in from the next room. Our lesson is over. We clear the table, wash our hands and remove our white coats. We drink a toast to Perry and, sitting beneath the carcasses, start our meal. It is delicious.

As I eat I decide two things. First, that I am never going to buy supermarket pork again. And second, that von Bismarck was not quite right. Sausages can be less like laws and more like justice: to understand their value, we must see what they are made of.

Picture Credit: The Ginger Pig

(Catherine Nixey is a writer based in London. In a similar vein, Charles Nevin has written for Intelligent Life about making his garden a pig farm, and then dining on the fruits of his toils.)