MEAT

The butcher down the street is a nice man with a beautiful smile. He keeps on the somewhat-less-than-clean countertop enormous sheets of chicharrón (fried pork skin) which he offers with a napkin to his customers. Yesterday, I went for ground pork to make, I told him, chiles enogada. He was impressed at my tackling that complicated dish. We chatted about cooking while I took miniscule nibbles of my chicharrón and wondered how to get rid of it. After I had wrapped it in a napkin explaining that I wanted to save some for my husband, he ripped off another huge sheet for my esposo. We continued to chat about various Mexican dishes. I said I would like to make cochinito pibil one day and how do you say pork butt in Spanish. Well, he wasn’t sure that pork butt was what I wanted. He opened his refrigerated show case, brought out a hunk of meat and laid it on the still not-so-clean counter. This he said is the butt. Then out came another, laid next to it. These are the lower ribs. Next the upper ribs, the shoulder, a leg. “Look at this beautiful tenderloin. It comes from here.” Soon the entire pig was on the counter and I was treated to his idea of how to best cook each of these cuts. After about 45 minutes, I thanked him for the anatomy lesson, a kilo of chicken backs for soup, that he insisted was a “regalo,” and the chicharrón, my piece of which was starting to cause grease stains on my pants pocket where I had shoved it earlier.