Julie Powell - Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

There are so many people who've taught, supported, helped, and plain old put up with me during the writing of this book, I'm inevitably going to blank on some names here, so apologies in advance.

Thanks to the entire Fleisher's crew--Josh and Jessica Applestone, Aaron Lenz, Jesse, Colin, Hailey, Juan, and everybody else--who let me poke around the shop for six months, getting in the way, and gave me much undeserved free meat. Thanks to my guides and helpmeets on my travels--Santiago, Armando, Diego, Oksana, Kesuma, Leyan, Elly, and the park rangers of Ngorongoro Park in Tanzania, who managed to keep a clueless traveler alive and mostly well. Thanks to my family--Kay and John and Jordan Foster, Mary Jo and Jo Ann Powell, Carol Sander, Ethan and Elizabeth Powell--most of whom have declined to read this book, but in the most cheerful, loving way possible. Thanks to Emily Alexander-Wilmeth, Emily Farris, Eric Steel, and Amy Robinson, who plowed through drafts, gave great notes, and didn't hate me, as a general rule. Thanks to my "bleaders," you know who you are. Thanks to Robert, who's just the best dog in the world, and to Maxine, Lumi, and Cooper, who are the best cats, in no particular order. Thanks to my editor, Judy Clain, and her assistant, Nathan Rostron, who edit adroitly and remind me from time to time that there is such a thing as too much information. Thanks to Michelle Aielli, my "publicist" at Little, Brown; I use quotation marks not to denigrate her astounding PR powers, but rather to indicate my discomfort in attaching such an oft-mocked word to a friend who does such a remarkable job of keeping me sane. Thanks to therapist Anna and bartender Marcel, who also pull double shifts on sanity maintenance.

Most of all, I thank Eric and D. Writing your own story is easy enough; having your story written by another is hard. I am grateful down to my toes to you both, for your generosity and grace in handling a situation difficult and not of your choosing.

ALSO BY JULIE POWELL

Julie and Julia

After a misspent youth involving loads of dead-end jobs and several questionable decisions, Julie Powell, the author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, has found her calling as a writer-cum-butcher. She lives in Long Island City, Queens, when she isn't in Kingston, New York, cutting up animals.

A year and a half earlier, July 2006.

I GUESS I really have been in the city too long; I've acquired, among other traits of the native New Yorker, a blanket disdain for the entire state of New Jersey. I was irrationally hesitant to come here. But on this day NJ Route 202 is leading me through an unexpectedly lovely landscape of gentle hills and dilapidated barns. I'm getting no service on my BlackBerry, which sends a slight frisson of panic through my body, making my teeth buzz in my gums; this must be another one of those New Yorker things I've picked up. I keep lighting up the screen and scrutinizing it for bars, but it's no-go.

The air breezes in through my rolled-down windows, warm and smelling heavily of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass, rather than the diesel fumes and sour chemical smoke that clung to my nostrils during the run down the turnpike. It calms me. I breathe deeply.

It's been a frustrating few months.

* * *

I GUESS the truth is that butchers intimidate the hell out of me. I've long had a bit of a thing for them, akin to the way many women feel about firefighters. Burly Irishmen covered in soot are okay, I guess, if you're into that. But I prefer this world's lock-pickers to its battering rams. Anybody with enough resolve and muscle can bust down a door; that kind of force I comprehend completely. I myself possess it, psychologically if not physically--just call me Julie "Steamroller" Powell. But a man who can both heave a whole pig over his shoulder and deftly break down the creature into all its luscious parts, in a matter of moments? That's a man whose talents I can really use.

I'm attracted to a butcher's intimate knowledge. Romantically, I imagine it's innate, that his nicked hands were born knowing how to slice those whisper-thin cutlets. I'm attracted to his courtly, old-world brand of machismo. Butchers are known for their corny jokes and their sexism, but when the man behind the counter calls me "sweetheart" or "little lady," I find myself flattered rather than offended. Most of all, I'm attracted to his authority. There's an absolute sureness to a butcher, whether he is chining lamb chops with a band saw or telling his customer just how to prepare a crown roast. He is more certain of meat than I've ever been about anything. Rippling deltoids and brawny good looks are nice, of course, but to me a butcher's sureness is the definition of masculinity. It strikes me as intoxicatingly exotic, like nothing I've ever experienced. (Well, not for years, anyway, not since I was a kid. I think of the teenager I was when I found Eric and took him to me, and it's like remembering an entirely different person.)

Maybe that's why I seem unable to open my mouth around butchers.

IF I'M dreading a conversation, I tend to practice it over and over in my head beforehand, perhaps not the most effective of preparation techniques. "I want to learn how to--"... "I was hoping you could teach me to--"... "I'm really so interested in what you do..." Ugh.

This is far from the first butcher I've tried to ask for this favor. Weeks ago, I asked the guys at Ottomanelli's--my first butcher shop when I moved to New York City, and still my favorite. It's a tidy storefront on Bleecker Street with hams and ducks hanging in the meticulously polished windows and a tight awning overhead, red and white stripes as neat as the trimmed and tied meat and bones within. I used to be a regular there, and the guys behind the counter--brothers, I think, all of them in their sixties or seventies, white coats spanking clean despite days of blood and ooze--still always make a point of greeting me when I come in. It's not quite a "Norm!" sort of welcome, but there's warmth there.

But when I managed to ask, stammering, if they had a place for an apprentice with zero experience, they demurred. Not particularly shocking, I suppose. Instead they suggested one of the culinary schools downtown. I briefly entertained this notion, but it turns out culinary programs don't offer one-off classes on butchering, and I wasn't about to shell out twenty thousand bucks for a yearlong program teaching restaurant management and pastry making, my personal vision of hell. I proceeded to ask around at the handful of other butcher shops in the city, or try to, anyway. Half the time I couldn't even get the words out. When I did, the men behind the counter looked at me as if I might be a tad touched and shook their heads.