Of Butchers…

When most Americans think of the “freshness” of French food, I’m sure a few tasty images typically come to mind: the technicolor orgy of the farmer’s market, the smell and crisp of fresh bread, the rich tang of raw milk. But nowhere is such freshness better exhibited – and in no manner more striking to shrinkwrapped American sensibilities – than under the butcher’s knife.

A couple of weekends ago, while poking about the Saturday market at Mauber-Mutualité for some brunch fixin’s, I came across one of the itinerant boucheries that had set up shop there. To my sanguine delight, behind the glass counter, behind the butcher himself, hung a great queue of skinned, drained carcasses, the most impressive of which was, or once was, a goat. Madame Chevré hung confusedly from one of her hind legs, stripped of her weekend finery and looking as uncomfortable as the dead can. Though I have come across happy pigs heads in Brooklyn Italian butcher shops, never had I seen an animal so lately gutted, skinned, and offered up for retail. On a table to the side of the display, a healthy hare, still in his winter coat – and I do mean still – waited patiently beneath another butcher’s knife, which cut the air as the price of its object was under dispute.
I sorely regretted not having my camera that day. Madame Chevré and Monsieur Lapin were as fresh images in my mind as they were fresh meat for the scale. Neither of them disturbed me in the least; if anything, I found it quite proper and cordial of them to show their faces to the shoppers. The American meat and poultry industry has long been a source of moral disquiet for me, on three fronts: first, for the reprehensible “husbandry” of factory farms; second, for the unnatural hormonal, dietary and genetic alterations; and third, for the, shall we say, client-side divorce from that supermarkets force between meat and its eaters. For an unsuspecting tourist, I thought, this would make a happy reunion of the raw and the cooker.

I am a meat-eater, and though I have never killed a warm-blooded creature I have long said that, if to eat meat I must murder a cow, why then I’d bathe shoulder deep in its blood as I drew a blade across its throat. I would stare into its doelful, dimming eyes and promise that its sleep would be sweet, as its flesh would be to me. I’m prepared to do that. Maybe I’d cry a little, but I’d do it. Steak is too goddamned good. The point is, most urban and suburban (i.e. nonhunting) are so, so far removed from the realities of meat – farming, raising, killing, dressing, butchering, hell, cooking – that seeing Madame Chevre in her undress, and Monsieur Lapin patient for the knife, threw a lifetime of sanitized consumption into relief.

That relief became all the more stark today. Luckily, I had my camera. Now, Europeans are, in general, much more omnivorous than Americans. Even if you tremble in the face of tripe, one happy medium that the Euros have dicked is game meats. Grouse, pheasant, deer… In Corsica they eat wolf for God’s sake. (There’s a resto here I plan on trying it at.) One game meat I developed a taste for, while I was studying abroad in Prague (in 2001, during the height of the Mad Cow scare), is wild boar. Unlike pork, it is not a white meat. It is dark and unctuous and tastes as much of the forest as the goat tastes of the farm. Donc, imagine my thrill when I encountered our fine friend, pictured above, snoozing fitfully over the side of butcher’s case, the hollow of his gut modestly covered with a yard of cloth. A spectacular animal, and a spectacular piece of advertising. No one was immune to his charms – children, held by their parents, would reach out to pet his smiling snout; passing teenagers would shake a hoof in greeting; older adults would smile and study him hungrily. How many family dinners can a boar make? I’ll let you know when my French is better, but tomorrow I plan on seeing exactly what fine parts Madame Sanglier has been parsed into.