Observing a butcher elegantly wield a knife is a spectacle, one I recommend to anybody tempted by the smells of a burger on the grill. Years ago in cooking school, I was rapt by my first butchery demonstration on a lamb, and I wasn’t even a meat eater then. Since there’s no blood to speak of (slaughter and butchery are two vastly different steps in the process), the butcher’s craft is akin to witnessing a master wood carver create an end table from a stump.

Underly is one of several pro butchers to publish a book on her craft, “The Art of Beef Cutting.” Her step-by-step illustrated guide is geared toward professional meat cutters, but is approachable for motivated home cooks. Other recent books are for the general meat eater eager to learn their striploin from their skirt steak. They include San Francisco 4505 Meats butcher Ryan Farr’s “Whole Beast Butchery” and New York-based Fleisher’s owners Joshua and Jessica Applestone’s “The Butcher’s Guide to Well-Raised Meat.”

Along with “The Butcher’s Apprentice,” these books aim at the DIY market and the mania for home-cured bacon and assorted salumi. The newest butchery book out this spring is “Butchery & Sausage-Making for Dummies.” Written by San Francisco Chef Tia Harrison, co-founder of The Butcher’s Guild and co-owner of Avedanos Meats, this book brings butchery to the masses.

As I paged through illustrations, photographs and diagrams of animal carcasses and cuts in each of these books, I wondered how many people would find it both fascinating and useful.

Butchery is back, but is it relevant for everyone?

By the time I witnessed Underly in action in Seattle, I had years of informal experience cutting up parts of beef, elk, pork and lamb, whole rabbits, chickens, duck and turkey.

Chef Kari Underly demonstrates her meat-cutting technique. Credit: Range, Inc.

Laying my hands on primals and smaller muscle groups gave me firsthand understanding of how those parts related to the whole. I had an intimate understanding of how the composition of the shoulder differed from the leg, right down to the muscle texture and color.

These experiences handling, cutting, trimming, chopping and grinding my own meat not only improved my knife work, they also enhanced my cooking knowledge and skill with anything meaty.

Even if you don’t aspire to break down a whole hog or side of beef, there are surprisingly many transferable skills to be learned from a bit of butchery. Butchery guidebooks such as these are an accessible starting point for seeking out new opportunities to use your knife.

You can also sign up for a class, watch an online video or enlist a more experienced friend.

Here’s what some hands-on butchery experience can do for you:

• Connect with the meat you eat, its source and quality. Once you get up close and personal with your meat, it’s impossible not to ask questions, including how was this animal raised? What was it fed? How was it slaughtered? You become a more conscious carnivore.
• Learn the location and composition of cuts. Carcasses are like jigsaw puzzles. When you take just one piece at a time, you can more easily grasp the whole. You can then translate what you know about beef to pork to lamb, or chicken to duck to game birds.
• Increase your confidence at the meat counter and in the kitchen. Have you felt shy approaching the butcher counter? Or, do you only buy steaks because you know how to cook them? With a little experience, you become the master your favorite meats.
• Understand the reasons for different cooking methods. The proportion of lean to fat in any cut determines whether it needs slow cooking or can be roasted, grilled and sautéed. Demystify the cooking and your options open wide.
• Waste less and use more of the meat you buy. Whether you purchase a whole tenderloin to trim or a pork shoulder to smoke, you’ll find a good use for every morsel of meat, fat and even bone. Stock and sausage making are natural next steps.

5 Butchery Skills for Beginners

With your knives — a boning knife and chef’s knife are all you need — freshly sharpened, here are some beginning butchery skills anyone can try at home:

• Slice your own steaks from a strip loin (or boneless rib roast or top round roast)
• Bone a whole chicken
• Bone a leg of lamb, roll and tie it
• Butterfly pork loin
• Trim a whole tenderloin

Top photo: A butcher Frenching a rack of lamb. Credit: David L. Reamer

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Most of what is new in home cooking in the United States is a result of the incorporation of food magazine ideas, which are heavily influenced by restaurant chefs who wow the food magazine editors. Ask a magazine or newspaper food editor if they would rather have lunch at a Gordon Ramsay restaurant or with my friend who is a good cook and they’ll choose Gordon Ramsay in a heartbeat.

Home cooking is not fancy cooking, but it’s real cooking. I love when someone cooks for me and they say, “Oh it’s really nothing, the recipe is how my grandmother used to do it.” That’s music to my ears.

I remember one marvelous instance in the mid-1970s when I was about to go backpacking in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. My friend Jeff had been a fire ranger that summer and a Vista volunteer earlier and became friendly with a farmer named James Mines whose ranch was nestled below the range northeast of Farson. James’ farm was the last piece of land to be settled in the West under the provisions of the Homestead Act. He and his wife had seven children and raised hay, some cows, quite a few horses and some swine.

Wild West home cooking for an East Coast city boy

I just arrived from New York City and was the living definition of a city slicker. It was dusk when we arrived and it was cold even though it was July. There were no neighbors, nothing but the ranch house and purple mountain majesties above a fruited plain. We had dinner that night of pan-seared mutton shoulder chops and mashed potatoes. I was raving about this meal and still remember it almost 40 years later. I’ve never been able to reproduce it, partly because mutton must be special ordered. Maybe what made it so special was the situation and locale, which is certainly not to be overlooked. But more important there was no nod to modernity or faddishness. This was simply how the Mines family cooked it. The mutton tasted enormously flavorful, as if it had been charcoal-grilled, which it hadn’t. The mashed potatoes were powerfully savory and slightly chunky with bits of well-cooked bacon and butter in them.

The Mines didn’t raise their own sheep. They were raised by big sheep outfits all over Sweetwater County. They could buy inexpensive mutton rather than raise sheep themselves. Jeff believes the mutton we ate that night was from James Magagna, who owned the large sheep operation centered at the robber’s roost of Paddy McCann, an old-time local bushwacker, where Jeff had spent the summers of 1976 and 1978.

“The mutton was freshly slaughtered a few days before and had been hanging in an open-air screened enclosure to cure during those days, since that was how those things were usually done,” Jeff said.

They couldn’t quite believe how excited I was, and frankly, I couldn’t believe it either and had to reassure them I wasn’t just being polite. I had the best sleep ever that night, feeling the cold outside and listening to the coyote howl and the wind whip through the brush.

Mutton Chops With Mashed Potatoes

Serves 4

Ingredients

4 mutton shoulder chops (about 2½ pounds)

Salt to taste

4 russet potatoes (about 2¾ pounds), peeled and quartered

4 strips thick cut bacon (about ¼ pound), cut into small pieces

¼ cup unsalted butter

Directions

1. In a large cast iron skillet, over medium-low heat, cook the mutton chops, seasoned with salt, until tender, about 1 hour.

2. Put the potatoes in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and cook until they fall apart, about 25 minutes in all. Remove and mash coarsely.

3. Meanwhile, in another cast iron skillet or a sauté pan, cook the bacon over low heat until crispy, about 10 minutes. Add the mashed potatoes, butter and salt; stir to mix, and cook 2 minutes. Serve hot with the mutton chops.

Mutton chops with mashed potatoes. Credit: Clifford A. Wright

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Recently I interviewed a young Navajo girl named Chassitti Lincoln who has been helping her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother in the kitchen on their reservation in Arizona since she was small.

They invited me to witness the passing down of some of the traditional Navajo recipes from this group of women onto the next generation, namely Chassitti.

I drove 50 back-road miles to the small town of Pinion, Ariz., then two miles up a rugged dirt road to the crest of a hill where there was a small house and a sweat lodge overlooking more than 1,000 acres of land. This is Sage Spring, where Chassitti’s family has lived for more than 100 years. Their clan is called One Walks Around You.

Chassitti is interested in learning how to make traditional Navajo foods that are healthy because she knows type 2 diabetes is prevalent in Indian families, including her own.

It is no small thing for four generations of Navajo women to gather and cook, and so relatives came to be part of the meal from as far as Phoenix.

Great-grandmother Ruth and grandmother Mary greeted me in their traditional velvet dresses and turquoise jewelry. Chassitti’s 90-year-old grandfather, who is almost blind, was there. He is a medicine man and still treats some tribal ailments.

The lamb for this feast was tethered in a small corral by the side of the house. In front of the corral, there was an open fire pit laid with cedar and an iron rack to cook the lamb after slaughter and butchering. In the Navajo tradition an animal’s life is never taken without the honoring of its spirit.

Chassitti told me that along with the roasted lamb, our menu for lunch would include juniper ash blue corn mush, over-the-grill tortillas, roasted Anaheim green peppers and a mixed summer salad.

Respecting the sacrifice

I had never killed an animal, nor even watched one being slaughtered. On this day, respecting this lamb’s spirit, I prepared myself to watch as it gave up its life for our lunch.

With the cedar fire lit, the lamb was led out of the corral to a spot overlooking the barren canyon. Several feet from the fire, a rope was hanging from a tall pole stuck deep into the ground. Whispering to the lamb in Navajo, Chassitti’s father knelt down to tie the lamb’s feet together and then, taking a long sharp knife from his pocket, he quickly and efficiently slit the lamb’s throat. I watched the lamb for any signs of terror, but all I saw was the gentle draining out of the lamb’s life. Within moments Chassitti’s father picked the lamb up, suspending it head first, feet tied to the rope while the remaining blood drained out into a bowl that Dave Jr.’s mother lifted under the lamb’s neck.

“Have you ever had blood sausage?” Chassititi’s grandmother, Mary, asked me. “Usually [it is] just blood and seasoning like onions and carrots, parsley, even potatoes, stuffed into a casing and then tied off and poached in pretty hot water.”

Somewhere back in time I remember my Swedish grandmother serving blood pudding, which sounds similar.

“You know we eat everything,” she said. “The whole lamb including the head, even the eyeballs.”

A fourth generation joins the ritual

Chassitti returned to the circle of people that now included her grandparents, brother and sister. They skinned the lamb, the pelt coming off whole. Chassitti draped it over the chicken coop.

“It can be used as a rug,” she said. “In the old days it was used for bedding. Grandma Mary will wash it and dry it in the sun.”

Now came the butchering. With each of the grandmothers offering Chassitti suggestions, she disassembled the carcass with her father’s sharp knife. As I looked on, it was amazing to me how quickly that beautiful lively creature became meat.

Inside the house, one of Chassitti’s aunts pressed juniper ash through a strainer, prepared days ago from the ash of burned juniper branches. Great-grandmother Ruth and grandmother Mary returned to the kitchen and stirred a pot of blue corn flour (blue corn is more nutritious than yellow or white corn) with a pair of greasewood sticks made from rabbit brush into boiling water. Strained juniper ash was added to the mush mixture and stirred over this hot burner until thickened. The juniper ash is full of calcium and deemed extremely beneficial for pregnant and nursing women.

Another aunt washed Anaheim peppers, to be grilled along with the lamb.

Ruth sat at the kitchen table mixing a bowl of flour, milk, and baking powder into a batter to be rolled out by hand. It is the traditional recipe for Navajo fry bread, but in the interest of greater health, Chassitti planned to grill it over the hot fire when the meat has finished.

After all, the food was cooked and laid out on a beautiful wooden table, we gathered in a circle and Dave, Chassitti’s grandfather, said a long prayer in Navajo. He bowed to the lamb, to the holy people and Four Corners, the water, and the land. He bowed to his family. We all bowed to each other in thanks.

When I bit into that lamb, I tasted the fresh goodness of the meat and all of the love with which the animal grew up. But I also tasted the continuity of life itself in that tight and traditional Navajo community.

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My Mother’s Roasted Spring Leg of Lamb

This is my favorite spring delicacy. The pasture-raised lamb I used came from Poorfarm Farm, in Vermont, which belongs to my daughter’s boyfriend.

Ingredients

Directions

1. Rub the bottom of the pan with a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Place half the bunch of rosemary sprigs and thyme sprigs in the pan. Using a knife, make fine cuts in the leg of lamb and place the garlic cloves into the slits. Place the leg of lamb on top of the herb layer, salt and pepper, cover with a dish towel and let it rest for an hour or so.
2. Heat the oven to 500 F.
3. Toss all of the vegetables in the remaining oil (2 to 3 tablespoons) and surround the lamb with the veggies. Roast for about 20 minutes and then turn the temperature down to 350 F and cook until a meat thermometer reaches 130 F.
4. For medium rare, this should take  about 40 minutes. Transfer it to a platter and let it rest for while before carving.

Blue Corn Mush (Taa’niil, Tanaashgiizh)

Ingredients

Directions

1. Mix juniper ash with 1 cup boiling water.
2. Strain ashes into the remaining 3 cups boiling water and stir.
3. Add 4 cups of blue cornmeal and stir. Boil for 30 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir.

Blue corn meal mush with juniper ash (Taa niil) has 802 mg of calcium in one cup, compared to 2.4 mg of the same amount without ash.

Zester Daily contributor Katherine Leiner has published many award-winning books for children and young adults and, more recently, her first novel for adults, “Digging Out” (Penguin). Her most recent book, “Growing Roots: The New Sustainable Generation of Farmers, Cooks and Food Activists” won half a dozen awards, including the National Indie Excellence Gold Medal Award. Katherine’s next novel is due this year.

Photos, from top:

Great-grandmother Ruth and Grandmother Mary prepare meat for the feast.

Chassitti Lincoln

Credits: Andrew Lipton

The post Navajo Lamb Feast appeared first on Zester Daily.

Sumac does have an aroma, though, and a unique one. It’s sort of woody, literally like wood. It reminds me of chewing on the end of a wooden pencil in third grade, something I was absolutely not supposed to do. To me it will always have the glamour of the forbidden.

Foodies barely scratched the surface with sumac, though. They mostly accepted it in the form of za’atar, a mixture of sumac, wild thyme and usually some sesame seeds that is often sprinkled on fried eggs in the Middle East. It’s also sprinkled on flatbread before it goes in the oven or mixed with olive oil to make a tart dip with a slightly wild, wandering-on-the-sunburnt-hillsides flavor.

But it can be used, and has been used, like any other tart flavor. The Lebanese salad fattoush (purslane, tomatoes, pita bread croutons) is sprinkled with sumac. In Turkey, sumac extract (sumak ekşisi) is sold as a sort of fruit juice “vinegar,” similar to tamarind extract or sour pomegranate juice.

In the Middle Ages, the most common stuffing for baked fish was ground walnuts and sumac. And a 13th-century cookbook by Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, the Scribe of Baghdad — we who know him just call him al-Baghdadi — has a recipe for lamb stewed with walnuts and sumac, into which you stir a little yogurt at the last minute. It’s called fakhitiyya, from fakhita, with is the Arabic name of the wood dove.

There’s nothing dovish in the flavor. Clearly the reason for the name is the color of the sauce — purplish sumac, combined with the brown meat and walnuts and the white yogurt, makes it resemble the purplish-brown throat patch of the wood dove. (The Arabs consider the patch to resemble a fakht or moon shadow.) Sumac is available at Middle Eastern markets (in Farsi the name is spelled somagh) and from online sources such as thespicehouse.com and chefswarehouse.com.

Combined with the spices, which look like curry on paper but give a totally different effect, the walnut-sumac-yogurt flavoring makes for a dish with a distinctive medieval quality. Yes, this is what medieval food could taste like; easy time travel, everybody. And no doves were killed in the process.

If you’re interested in more recipes like this, my translation of al-Baghdadi was published in 2005 by Prospect Books as “A Baghdad Cookery Book Newly Translated.” Warning: In the Middle Ages, they rarely felt the need to give measurements, so you’re sort of on your own.

Fakhitiyya

Serves 4

Ingredients

Directions

1. Trim the lamb and cut it into ¾-inch chunks.
2. Put the oil in a pan, heat it over medium-high heat and fry the lamb until stiffened and slightly browned.
3. Transfer the meat to a small saucepan. Deglaze with frying pan with about 1 cup water. Add the coriander, cumin, cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, salt, walnuts and the water, with enough more water to cover. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer, partly covered, until the lamb is quite tender, 1 to 1¼ hours.
4. When the meat is nearly done, stir in the sumac. When ready to serve, stir in the yogurt — off the heat, so that it doesn’t curdle. Correct seasoning and add more sumac if desired.

Zester Daily contributor Charles Perry is a former rock ‘n’ roll journalist turned food historian who worked for the Los Angeles Times’ award-winning Food section, where he twice was a finalist for the James Beard award.

Photos, from top:

Lamb à la Dove With Sumac.

“A Baghdad Cookery Book Newly Translated.”

Credit: Charles Perry

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Nancy Harmon Jenkins is the author of several books, the latest of which is her newly revised “The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook.”  Her other food books include, “Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of the Cuisines of Southern Italy” and “The Essential Mediterranean,” which looks at a dozen foods key to understanding Mediterranean cuisines.  She also wrote “Flavors of Tuscany,” “Flavors of Puglia” and “The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook.”  She is working on a book on Atlantic salmon.  A former staff writer with The New York Times, Nancy continues to contribute to the Times in addition to writing for The Washington Post, Saveur, Food & Wine and other national publications.  She currently divides her time between a Tuscan farmhouse and a home on the coast of Maine where she was born and raised.  She has lived and worked throughout the countries of the Mediterranean, at various times making a home in Spain, France, Italy, Lebanon, and Cyprus as well as in Hong Kong and England. You can read more of her food writing on her site, NancyHarmonJenkins.com.

Decades later, having covered Vietnam, Iran, the higher levels of the British and French foreign offices, and several U.S. political campaigns, Johnny would be reassigned, at his own suggestion, to roam the world for The Times, not investigating foreign matters so much as recording his gastronomic escapades with his wife Betsey. It was an assignment, with an expense account to match, that had almost every other Times reporter positively green with envy. We were all stumped by the question: How on earth did he get away with that?

But Betsey and the global-eating assignment came later. Back in the day — the 1970s — during one Easter week I was planning a Sunday feast at our family farmhouse in the hills of eastern Tuscany. Johnny was staying in Perugia with friends — of course it would be the head of the Perugina chocolate factory, who was also a great patron of music and musicians. Johnny loved music almost as much as he loved food. Not quite, but almost.

I can’t remember now what persuaded him to leave the chocolate factory and the music, but leave it he did to drive up into our hills. We were gathering an assembly from near and far, types that ranged from fellow journalists (the man I was married to at the time was of that tribe) to hippy English back-to-the-landers, a pair of poets. A world-renowned feminist never shy of expressing her opinions brought along an embarrassingly younger lover, then took one look at the more handsome of the hippies and forthwith settled on him.

I think of that meal every year as Easter looms because I outdid myself — not just because of Johnny, although of course I wanted to impress him. But somehow everything fell into place, as it often does — the lamb was tender, the early peas and fava beans had all the immaculate delicacy of new spring vegetables. The wine was a perfect match, even though the husband carefully steered the best bottles toward his and Johnny’s end of the table, leaving the local plonk for the hippies and poets.

But what was most wonderful was the lamb, a couple of legs of a very young critter that I prepared from a recipe developed by an old friend, Sara Armstrong, once the chef-doyenne of the renowned Copper Kettle restaurant in Aspen, Colo. She too had traveled the world, but as a diplomat rather than a journalist, and had assembled a vast collection of recipes that were the backbone of that amazing establishment. It’s been years since the Copper Kettle closed, and Sara has long since gone to the great kitchen in the sky, but every year at Easter I try to make what she called simply “Roast Lamb With Dill.” I cook it in memory of her, and in memory of Johnny Apple, who ever after expressed amazement at what he called Roast Lamb With Coffee. And what do I call it? Slow Roasted Lamb for Easter.

Slow-Roasted Lamb for Easter

Ingredients

Directions

1. Prepare the lamb by inserting garlic slivers all over the fleshiest parts of the leg. Use a small sharp-pointed knife to make incisions and slip the garlic slivers in. Let stand at room temperature for 2 hours before roasting.
2. Preheat the oven to 275 F.
3. Set the lamb leg on a rack in a roasting pan. Rub the leg all over with the molasses, then (first washing and drying your hands) sprinkle generously with salt, pepper and tarragon, plus half the dill and the coriander.
4. Roast the lamb in the preheated oven for about 3½ hours, or until a meat thermometer reads 170 F. Baste the lamb every 30 minutes or so with a mixture of coffee and wine, gradually blending in the accumulated juices on the bottom of the roasting pan.
5. When the roast is done, remove but keep it warm while you prepare the sauce to serve with it.
6. In a small saucepan, crush the egg yolks with a fork into the vinegar. Blend in the remaining dill and the parsley.
7. Strain the juices from the roasting pan, removing as much fat as possible. Add them to the saucepan, set the pan over low heat and blend with the egg mash.
8. Add lemon juice and blend, then taste and adjust the salt and pepper.
9. Finally stir in the coarsely chopped egg whites. Bring the sauce to a boil just before serving.
10. Carve the lamb in thin slices and pass the sauce.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins is the author of several books, including “Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of the Cuisines of Southern Italy” and “The Essential Mediterranean.”

Photo credit: Bocky Tandiono / iStockphoto.com

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I encountered it long ago on a blustery day in Antioch, Turkey. Later I discovered it was pretty much the same as a Lebanese dish with the odd name the Dervish’s Rosary (masbahat al-darwish). This seems to be the only odd Middle Eastern dish name that doesn’t come with an anecdote to explain it, though I can imagine a hungry dervish praying over this aromatic item.

It’s one of the countless stews from that part of the world based on eggplant and tomatoes; moussaka is probably its best-known cousin. It gets a unique flavor from the way it’s cooked. It’s baked in a sort of roasting pan called a siniyya, so that it thickens up considerably as it cooks and the vegetables (particularly the tomatoes) get faintly browned or even scorched on top, giving a sweet, haunting aroma.

It’s one of the dishes people traditionally baked in the village bread oven — even in Beirut, you sometimes see little kids on their way to a bakery, balancing trays of masbahat al-darwish on their heads.

But the Lebanese versions all seem to include potatoes, which tend to make the stew floury, so I prefer chickpeas. Over the years I have drifted into using the quasi-Moroccan flavorings oregano and turmeric. In Lebanon, there would probably be nothing but cinnamon and allspice.

You don’t need a siniyya — a 9-inch by 13-inch roasting pan does fine. The recipe calls for lamb but beef stew meat would work too. Just make sure it’s cooked tender before serving. You may have to add water and bake longer if necessary.

It’s just about impossible to find ripe tomatoes at this time of the year, so I’d substitute canned tomatoes (hey, you’re cooking the tomatoes anyway; this isn’t salad). In Lebanon, the frying would be done in clarified butter, which is quite warming and comforting, but you can certainly use oil. These days I often do.

The Dervish’s Rosary

Serves 4

Ingredients

Directions

1. If using butter, melt it in a small pan, skim off the froth and pour the clear butterfat from the watery whey.
2. Put 2 tablespoons butter or oil in a frying pan and fry the onions over medium heat until softened and just starting to turn yellow. Transfer to a 9-inch by 13-inch roasting pan.
3. Put more oil or butter in the pan, briefly fry the eggplant and zucchini and add them to the onions.
4. Put in the rest of the oil or butter, raise the heat to high and fry the meat in two batches until the pieces start to brown, stirring constantly.
5. Add the meat to the roasting pan along with the chickpeas, salt, pepper, oregano, cinnamon and turmeric. Top with the tomatoes (if whole, slice them first). Add enough water to just cover everything.
6. Bake at 350 F until the meat is done and the stew is fairly thick, about 2½ hours.
7. Taste and add salt and lemon juice if you wish. Serve with plain rice pilaf.

Zester Daily contributor Charles Perry is a former rock ‘n’ roll journalist turned food historian who worked for the Los Angeles Times’ award-winning Food section, where he twice was a finalist for the James Beard award.

Photo: Dervish’s Rosary. Credit: Charles Perry

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