Steak - Mark Schatzker [51]
Scottish weather notwithstanding, Vernet is living the meat lover’s dream. He is, technically, the head of marketing for Quality Meat Scotland, but Vernet does not consider himself a marketer so much as “a man of passion.” Here is an individual paid a salary to find good meat, eat that meat, and then talk about it. He studied economics—“a fascinating subject filled with boring people”—wrote his thesis on lamb, then pursued his lifelong dream to live in Scotland, which he describes as “a rough land with uncomplicated food.” After he graduated, he drove from France to Scotland and took a job in a slaughterhouse, gutting sheep and harvesting the meat off their heads.
One morning Vernet was reading the newspaper when he spotted an employment posting from the Northern Ireland Meat Board. He applied and a short time later was offered a job traveling around the world to see how different people and cultures eat and enjoy meat. The idea was that by visiting Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Argentina, Mongolia, and a few other countries to eat meat, watch the locals eat, visit their butcher shops, and so forth, Vernet could help the Northern Irish understand how to sell meat to those very foreigners. Vernet accepted, of course.
He described this rather too nonchalantly as we drove from his office outside Edinburgh an hour east to a pretty town called Aberfoyle, which has one of the few remaining classic Scottish butcher shops, one that smells like a butcher shop should: of bone meal, sausage, dried blood, haggis, and aging meat. Vernet deems the Aberfoyle Butcher the best in Scotland. It is run by Jonathan Honeyman, a reedy man with a thin mustache and combed-down hair who looks as if he just stepped out of a black-and-white film and speaks with such a thick burr that the word “farm,” when uttered by him, can have as many as three syllables. Honeyman trained as an engineer, but his love of meat was such that he gave up the stability and comfort of a professional career to deal in meat for a living. His wife is a shepherd, and they have six border collies.
Honeyman has definite ideas about how the craft of butchery ought to be practiced. He dry-ages sides of beef for around twenty-one days, but rather than hang sides of beef from the hind leg, which is how it’s normally done, he prefers to hang his from the hipbone, believing this stretches the muscles in a way that improves the texture of the meat. He sells Shetland sheep from a herd whose bloodline can be traced back to the 1800s, when it changed hands as part of a wedding dowry, and which are, to this day, plunked down on various tiny islands in the North Sea to fatten during the summer, then picked up by boat and sent to market.
If a customer walks into the Aberfoyle Butcher on a typical day and asks for steak, he will be presented with three different breeds from which to choose. Some of Honeyman’s customers prefer the White Park breed. Others prefer Scottish Highlands—though Honeyman will tell you that Highlands haven’t tasted the same since the European Union, panicked over mad cow disease, decreed that they be slaughtered at too young an age. And some prefer Angus. “When you buy red wine,” Honeyman says, “you don’t just pick a dark bottle.” He thinks the same ought to be true of beef. The different breeds, he says, have different textures. “It’s the feel in the mouth, basically,” he explains. “I have noticed that on Charolais cattle, the texture is more open and grainy.” Some customers have no stated preference. They walk in the door, ask to have a look at whatever loins are aging in his fridge, and only then will they make a decision, at which point the knives come out and the steaks are cut and wrapped