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Graze anatomy: the various cuts of meat from a cow

Butchering a cow
The Time Out amateur meat team take lessons in butchery at the Ginger Pig, one of London’s best butchers

In most butchers’ shops the cold room is tucked away at the back, lest the sight of dead animals offend customers. But in this, as in most other respects, The Ginger Pig on Moxon Street is different. You can see right into its cold room through a window running the length of the wall. The intact carcasses resemble wax carvings. There are joints too: some bright red, some much darker – aubergine, like a freshly acquired bruise. We’re here because a flippant suggestion in a Time Out editorial meeting has turned serious. ‘Why don’t we buy a whole cow and cook every part of it?’ I wondered aloud and, the next thing I knew, the cow was bought. Now the Time Out amateur butchers’ team, deceptively professional in borrowed white coats, follows Borut the bona-fide butcher through the sliding door. The cold is intense, the floor tacky with blood and bits of meat. We tread carefully. But Borut doesn’t. He’s wearing trainers. I wonder if he takes them off when he gets home, or whether he’s so inured to working with and around meat that he forgets and stomps mince into the carpet. Maybe I’ll ask him, once he’s put that big knife down.
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Although as critics we’re all used to murdering reputations, we are not – in the style of BBC3’s ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It’ – going to be slitting the throat of our own animal. Instead, our comparatively civilised first encounter comes after it’s been hanging for 28 days. We’re expecting to see a whole cow on a hook. In fact, there’s only half; the rest of it is back at the farm. A whole beast is too big to store here. ‘A whole cow,’ Borut points out, ‘is very, very big – if people tried to carry the whole thing in one piece they would be injured.’ We nod confidently, keen to give the impression that we realised this before today, and pleased that half a cow looks enough like a whole cow to provide the requisite dramatic impact.

Mild-mannered man of books John O'Connell has a bash at butchery

In the last 40 years, meat consumption has grown from 56 to 89 kilos per person, per year in Europe and from 89 to 124 kilos in the US. Yet our relationship with the stuff is more strained and distant than ever. The sterile packs that supermarket meat comes in tell us nothing about the animal, about where it lived, what it was fed and how it was killed. Our grandparents knew exactly which part of the animal cuts like brisket, chuck and sirloin came from, but, if we’re honest, most of us have no idea. It’s lost knowledge – butchers’ arcana which has little bearing on contemporary dietary habits.

One of the great paradoxes of modern living is that as the power of the supermarkets soars, we effete urbanites can hardly open a cookery book or turn on the TV without Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall et al exhorting us to get blood on our hands or, at the very least, mud under our fingernails. It’s one of many reasons we decide to take on this challenge. Once we’ve had the beast butchered, we will try as far as possible to eat every legally edible bit of it (including bullock penis – a delicacy in China, apparently). But how do you deal with the logistical problems of buying a whole cow? Once you’ve bought it, where do you learn to cut it up? And how do you track down the behemoth-sized fridge/freezer needed to accommodate the carnage that will result from our butchery lessons?

Enter The Ginger Pig, long renowned as one of London’s best butchers’. Owner Tim Wilson breeds longhorn cattle at his farm in Levisham on the North York moors. Wilson’s methods are rigorously old-fashioned. ‘We have 1,000 pigs, 3,000 sheep and 400 cattle,’ he says. ‘To look after them properly takes 3,000 acres. The first rule of farming always used to be “one cow, one acre”. We stick to that.’ As well as the Moxon Street shop, Ginger Pig has a stall at Borough Market and is about to open a new store in east London near Victoria Park. And conveniently, Ginger Pig’s master butcher Borut (‘Not Borat: I’m from Slovenia’) has started giving butchery classes in the evenings…

Once we’ve bought one of their cows, a quick meeting with Borut and Patrice, the shop’s manager, makes clear the enormity of our task. There are decisions to make on how to cut it (there are different cuts of meat in different countries), on how many hours’ worth of butchers’ lessons we should take, and on how many people we will need to help us store the meat. While The Ginger Pig will keep the meat until it’s butchered, once it has been divided into roasts/steaks/chunks for casserole/mince we will have to take it home to our respective fridges and freezers.

Where's the beef? Oh, Borut's got it all

Why did we choose a cow and not a sheep? Because beef represents all that’s great, but also all that’s problematic, about modern meat eating. On the one hand, it’s easy to wax sentimental over the mythical beef of Olde England, so beloved of Henry VIII that he knighted his favourite cut (‘Sir Loin’). On the other, BSE is lodged forever in the folk memory, a tottering, drooling lesson in the importance of sound husbandry (and also the reason we’ve got to miss out on the delicacy of the cow’s brains).

The rule with beef is that it comes from castrated bullocks and young heifers which have never calved. Males produce a better proportion of lean meat to fat, but heifers carry less bone. (As it turns out, our ‘cow’ is a longhorn bullock called Del Boy. Like all cattle, it would have had a passport: in July 1996 the government introduced this system so that the movements of all cattle born in or imported to Britain could be tracked.) Longhorns are the oldest domestic breed in Britain. They have distinctive mahogany-and-white coats and curly horns, but also idiosyncratic fat distribution – less ‘marbling’, ie mottled streaks, than most breeds.

Over the coming weeks, then, we’ll be seizing the means of production: slicing, sawing and chopping until every last scrap of Del Boy is accounted for. We’ll be exploring different methods of cooking different cuts, but also trying at every stage to link the way we cook back to the way we cut the meat in the first place. At our first session I take the saw from Borut, as if I’m about to partake in some strange masculinity ritual, and crouch next to the carcass. I’ve never done anything like this before. With my right hand I hold the clammy corpse steady. I’m grateful that Del Boy’s head has been removed – that there aren’t any empty eye sockets for me to stare into. But the soft crunch as the saw’s teeth make contact with the bone is like a crowd applauding.

We bought our longhorn, Del Boy, at Ginger Pig. Visit www.learnbutchery.co.uk or www.thegingerpig.co.uk for info on Borut’s butchery classes.
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