Born a butcher

I was born a butcher.

From the age of five I would climb into the livestock lorry at first light with my father, a butcher in Annecy, to fetch pigs from the mountain pastures. Once the deal was done we would eat the ham and bacon the farmer set out for us, then drive back down to Annecy, where my father dropped me at school.

Carcasses, blood, the shop, the abattoir: that is my whole childhood. Very young, I would set off on my bicycle to the gut merchant at the abattoir, to fetch pig casings for making boudin. They would pour me coffee in a glass so greasy I could not see the colour of the coffee through it. It was a test, a kind of hazing that went by no name.

As a boy I was, almost, treated like a man, and I made a point of coming back with the goods. I bought my first heifer at eleven, still on the bicycle. I come home full of pride from Léon the farmer, who had given me a squash as a reward… My father looks at the heifer and says to me: “Lad, you did well. But that squash of yours, you paid for it three times over.”

The farmer had taken me. He knew my father, of course, he knew who I was, but business is business. The truth is my father knew I would be taken, and that nothing would teach me better. A good lesson that lasts a lifetime is never bought too dear. He sent me back to Léon the next time round, and that time I was not taken, nor ever again after. Léon played the game perfectly and brought his price down threefold. He watched me, smiling, as if to say: I gave you a kick up the backside and you understood. Good.

From the age of thirteen I killed the animals destined for our shop at the abattoir, alongside the piece-workers, who let me get on with it. We killed the beasts on the other side of a low wall with a matador, a cylindrical pistol loaded with small charges we called bosquettes.

Once school was over, rather than go and play football with my friends, I learned the craft of meat full time. I boned out calves’, pigs’ and beef heads. I learned pluchage, which means taking out the nerves and the aponeurosis from the membranes between the muscles of every cut of beef. I did the village rounds in my father’s van.

I have been a butcher for fifty-three years: the date the shop opened and the date I was born. She and I were born together. We have never left one another.

For half a century, near enough, I have called at the same farms every week, to sell meat or to buy animals. You can imagine the welcome. I go to the children’s communions, to the weddings and, sadly, as time passes, to the funerals too. I walk in at Jeanine’s. I buy her calves; we eat her tart. It is a rolled cake, a sponge filled with jam. The cake is a metre long and hangs over the sides of the fridge. I take the two ends that stick out.

At Papy Louis’s I buy heifers in the autumn. He has extraordinary pasture, covered in magnificent grass. The air is pure and there is not a fly for miles; the animals are not stressed. We do the deal; we each sit down on a bale of straw in the stable, I slice some saucisson, Louis draws a jug of red wine from a barrel. It is not wine, it tastes like vinegar. This has been going on for twenty years. It is as undrinkable as ever. But in that moment it is one of the finest drinks in the world.

The same goes for the customers. They come into the shop and “we go through the back”, as they put it, to share a plate of Savoyard or Corsican charcuterie in the back room, with a bottle. Meat makes friendship, and respect. It is so noble a product that it creates a closeness and a humanity between people that nothing else does.

With my meats from every origin, I take those who love France in all its subtle variety travelling through it. I sell Scottish beef, Aberdeen Angus, Salers brought from Aurillac in the Cantal, Fin Gras du Mézenc from the plateau at the foot of the Gerbier de Jonc. That one is an AOC meat available for only five short months of the year, fed on high-altitude hay, the aftermath cut alone, full of wild liquorice. And then I import Wagyu from Spain, the Ox of Oxen, that king of an animal from Kobe in Japan, where I discovered it, now acclimatised north of Burgos and soon, perhaps, in the Savoie, by my own hand. The lamb, of course, comes from the salt marshes of the Mont Saint-Michel. All these meats I dry-age for four to six weeks.

Above all I love the hampe, the thick skirt. When I was an apprentice we ate it at snack time. It is a very long, very tender cut. You bite into it a little, the juice fills your palate at once, and that muscle texture gives way under the tooth.

My father went too soon. I was twenty-three. I miss him still. Two women support me. Support is too weak a word. My mother is seventy-eight. She is at the shop every day; she is my Minister of Agriculture. Madame Bocquet still cuts the meat when the shop is in the thick of it. And she discovers, with an enthusiasm that would have delighted my father, the new meats the regions bring us one after another with the seasons. As for my wife, she is every bit as much a butcher as I am, which is saying something.

If there is one man in this world happy to be a butcher, look no further. It is me.

Claude Bocquet. Extract from the book “Louchébem”, Né Boucher, 2011 edition. Translated from the French.