THE MEAT PICKERS

A cook's secret feast.

THE MEAT PICKERS

Often times it seems the greatest flavors can only be obtained by the most menial jobs. When we start off cooking we are given those jobs. In time we might move up to other jobs that are less … some would say ‘monotonous’ and some would say ‘enriching’. I have heard that Thomas Keller say he still loves to do jobs like these. Maybe it was him talking about carefully washing dishes that he still loves to take upon from time to time. I will ask him when I see him next. For me it is being a meat picker. Or more honestly … being in a place that has this slow, labor intensive job going on within it. It means I am somewhere where folks still care about the longer arc of flavors only found in things like braising, stewing or 24-hour barbecue vigils.

I have known this job. Many times I have stood over a bowl the size of a small sled brimming with meat, bones, spent vegetables, an errant bay leaf and the blasted stems of thyme stripped from hours simmering to render the meat so perfectly tender a young child or an old woman could easily conquer it. My fingers would be smudged with the collagens of meat, the winy essences of liquids taken down, down, down. To do this job you feel more than think. You gently search with the infinite knowledge of touch. Thank god for the radio and the songs that played to take me away from the ache that would often visit me when my back or feet reminded me of how long I’d asked them to remain in one place, standing and stooping over in the mining of meat.

I found my prizes though. When you are still a very young cook you are often just too busy to really eat. When you are culling meat from a still hot chicken stock and you come across a part of the thigh with a golden sheaf of skin still attached you might do as I and place that morsel of magic in a small saucer and take up a clean fork and, breaking just for a moment, savor that meat and skin combo. Heaven! A few grains of salt were all that it needed.

I eventually became the chef and I taught our dishwashers to do this job. They worked standing up too. They stood with their hats turned backwards, dish towels over a shoulder, listening to the radio just like me. I remember walking into a kitchen once run by Douglas Rodriguez in New York City in the early 1990’s. He had a cadre of women picking meats for empanadas, papa rellenas, pasteles and more that he was taking into new directions for the shifting food trend loving denizens of Gotham. We walked amongst those women in Douglas’s wake as they happily chattered and worked with ancient skills. The invasive light of ascending mornings or … as the earth spun… the dimming light of late afternoons glided and skimmed across their focused faces just like those found in the light and shadow chiaroscuro imbued paintings by Rembrandt in the 1600’s.

It was my job again the other day. We were cooking at home and there were no others to call upon to do this while I attended to … ‘loftier’ tasks. It was oxtails this time. As I picked the bones of the still hot oxtails and laid them on a sheet pan I noted the similarity to my own bending spine with the four legged cow’s tail in my hands. I marveled at the change in size as the bones alter in size in the anatomical progression from north to south … the interlocking aspects … the quite similar cartilage between our bones. The radio was on. Some songs are still much the same, thank God. Jackie Wilson’s love ‘keeps lifting us higher’ and Mark Knopfler’s guitar bends ever lustrous notes around those ‘Sultans of Swing’ … and I know that all of the cats cruising the Ocean Drives or Magnificent Miles elsewhere on Earth might have that but they are missing this.

Three bowls were arranged before me. One for the meat, one for the bones and the third contained the most prized of all.. the concentrated liquids from the braise. I put that bowl far from the edge of my work space. I wanted it safe from any falls or spills.

Some have noted that the life of a kitchen person is marked by long hours. If measured by certain criteria that is true. But if you are happy then time is not beating you that way. And the silent satisfaction I’ve found in the pulling of morsels of meat from the bones and … taking a sample from time to time … were (and are) some of the finest hours I’ve known. The smell of the long cooked meats and sauce on my hands is a cologne I would not trade for all of the sculpted and ribboned bottles of Paris.

The squeamish shoppers of our modern lives prize the boneless, the skinless, the soul-less and cast a wary eye on the meat in the bowls of these picked meats. Those shoppers are not only clueless they are dangerous. If they relay such warped and unnatural values on to their children the possibilities of ‘nose-to-tail eating’ (humane and conscientious eating) are gone! If they had to live one single generation as farmers eking out a life that understands the sacred rhythms of bounty and deprivation … the world might ‘re-boot’ and become less doomed than many of us fear.

When our son brought us his little dog to watch over while he went off to find out more about life elsewhere in America my wife, Janet, would spend a good hour or more after making a chicken stock picking out the meat for the pooch known as “Bounder”. It was clear to me that these efforts softened her pain from missing our wandering man-child. Perhaps that is the same vacuum we are seeking to fill with the ancient power and flavors we get in the foods we gather from our hands.

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© 2024 Norman Van Ake

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