Bourdain Anthony - The ultimate companion to meat: on the farm, at the butcher, in the kitchen

THE ULTIMATE COMPANION TO

MEAT

ON THE FARM ~ AT THE BUTCHER ~ IN THE KITCHEN

ANTHONY PUHARICH

LIBBY TRAVERS

FOREWORD BY ANTHONY BOURDAIN

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For my father, Victor Puharich: my role model, my business partner, my best friend. AP

My dear friend Anthony Bourdain penned this generous foreword for the book just weeks before he passed away. I will miss you, Tony. AP

It is the single most beautiful butcher shop Ive ever seenthough butcher shop, while descriptive of a place where a fine and noble and quite ancient profession is practised, does not seem adequate to describe Victor Churchill. A temple of meat. A dream. A gift.

Everything is perfect. Beyond perfect. It is perhaps the most famous and certainly the most envied shop of its kind in the world. White-coated butchers break down primal cuts in a refrigerated glass cutting room. Old-school charcuterie of many wonderful kinds beckons like jewels from a display case. Another case contains fat slabs of rib eyes and sirloins and boutique cuts of boutique breeds of pampered animals. Chickens turn slowly on a magnificently restored rotisserie, filling the room with a smell that both comforts and compels.

Anthony Puharich created this wonderland around the bones of the already pretty damn cool Churchills, the oldest continuously operating butcher shop in Australia. It was an act of love, an homage to his father, a hard-working meat cutter and butcher who emigrated to Sydney and built a thriving business. What Anthony did was create the perfect space to cut meat. A fantasy of a butcher shop: theatre, retail shop, eatery and school.

Anthony has applied that same thinking, methodology and attention to detail to this lavish book. The Ultimate Companion to Meat is the perfect place to learn how to understand meat and what to do with it to maximum strategic and emotional effect. Anthony knows meat in ways that even I will never know. His deep history and experience with sourcing, ageing, handling, cutting and preparing animal protein is unparalleled. His extraordinary good taste and culinary instincts are obvious from the number of internationally famous chefs you often find huddled in the shops back room, greedily devouring the results.

You hold the right book in your hands. Learning from it will be delicious.

Anthony Bourdain

Following in the footsteps of his six siblings before him, my father Victor Puharich came to Australia from Croatia in search of opportunity. Each child in his family had been sent for a three-year stint, most of them finding work in the mines of Western Australia, after which they returned to their homeland to carry on the butchery trade. Unlike his siblings, however, Dad continued on to Sydney where he found love with my mother, Stephanie, a job in a butchery and a home. He stayed.

I was also told to break with tradition. My parents wanted their children to seek a better life. Butchery was labour intensive: it meant early starts and cold conditions, and it did not mean good money. They wanted their children to get an education.

I was the first person in both my fathers and mothers families to graduate from university. Mum wept with pride the first day I put on a suit and left for a job in merchant banking. It was civil, decent, clean work and yet, nine months into the role, I realised something wasnt right.

Despite the vastly different working hours of a butcher and banker, we always ate dinner together as a family. One night over dinner I mustered the courage to tell my parents that I wanted to be a butcher and work with Dad. It took me three months to convince my mum and dad to mortgage the house and my dad to leave the job he had worked at for 30 years and open a butchery with his son.

In February 1996, we opened Vics Premium Quality Meat, a traditional retail butchery in Sydneys Oxford Street. Our philosophy was simple: to pay respect to an animal by using every part of it. We were looking to re-create what our forefathers had done in Croatia, bringing in whole animals and butchering them on site: it was to be a place where offal was celebrated and the whole animal was consumed. Working side by side with my father was just what I had dreamt of, yet the business wasnt succeeding: within six months we had burned through our capital. There were not enough families, not enough people cooking at home. We needed a community, but we hadnt found it in Sydney.

Full of desperation, I set off in search of our community and started knocking on restaurant doors. It worked! The chefs understood and appreciated the dedication to the craft, the quality of our produce, the offal. Our community expanded to include farmers and producers too, as Dad and I sought out Australias best. We became wholesalers of Australias best meat to many of Australias best restaurants. Vics Meat quickly grew into one of the most revered meat companies in Australia.

In 2009, Churchills Butcherythe oldest continuously run butchery in Australiawas put up for sale. I saw this as an opportunity to open a neighbourhood butchery, something that had eluded us in the early years. When we reopened it as Victor Churchill, we returned the butchery to the community. Our business set the bar for butcheries around the world, putting meat on a pedestal as never before.

Im incredibly proud of my dad and of the business we have built together. Now were also working with my sister, Anita: the family business has become a reality. We have had the pleasure of working with many other great families over the decades, from chefs to producers and, perhaps most importantly, our many excellent employees.

When I met Libby in 2005, she was running the Produce Awards for