the right cut If Fleisher’s Joshua and Jessica Applestone have their way, the art of butchery is here to stay. By anne dailey • photography by jennifer may
Most of the meat Americans eat comes from animals raised in feedlots, processed in factories and displayed like candy bars in the supermarket aisle. It’s a cost-effective, quick way of doing business, and one that Kingston-based Fleisher’s Meats rejects entirely. At their small neighborhood shop, Joshua and Jessica Applestone practice butchery the old-fashioned way: breaking down whole animals by hand into steaks, roasts and custom-blended sausages, sourcing cows, pigs, lamb and poultry from local, pasturebased and organic farms and knowing their customers by name. And for five and a half years they’ve been the only game in town. Now, all of that is about to change. New butcher shops, following the Fleisher’s Meats model, will be populating the landscape in the next few years, from New York City to Maine and Chicago. So why are Joshua and Jessica smiling? Because those emerging butchers will not only have their blessing, they will essentially be their butcher progeny—graduates of a new apprenticeship program designed to train the next generation of butchers.
When the Applestones decided to open Fleisher’s Meats five and a half years ago, it was nearly impossible to find working butchers to learn from. Josh had worked in his grandfather’s butcher shop (the original Fleisher’s, in Brooklyn) many years before, and in kitchens around the country, but true butchery was, from his perspective, “a dying art.” “Nobody was doing what we do now,” says Jessica. “Nobody really cuts down whole animals into case-ready parts anymore.” With few existing models to study, the couple turned to retired butchers whose shops were long closed. “We brought in guys who had been butchering from the time they could pick up a knife,” recalls Jessica. “We used to ask them to come in and just sit around at the table and show us what they do.” It was essentially a crash course in traditional butchery.
While the experience was one that they wouldn’t trade for anything, the Applestones wondered if there wasn’t a better way to train people in a craft that was quickly becoming outmoded. “It seemed like it wasn’t the best way to learn,” says Jessica. “We wanted to pass it on in an easier, more efficient format.” There was certainly demand for the instruction—they’d had dozens of people express interest in learning from them over the years—but to train people properly, they believed, a more structured, clear-cut approach was necessary. “We wanted to be able to provide the knowledge but also to formalize it for ourselves,” explains Jessica. There was also a sense of duty. “We’re one of the only places that really does this by the book,” notes Josh. “So we have an opportunity, an obligation, really, to get people to learn this trade.”
So, about seven months ago, the couple sat down and hammered out a simple curriculum and course structure. The six to eight week apprenticeship program takes a more holistic approach to butchery. “We based it on our own experience as well as what we believe people should know,” says Jessica. While apprentices spend significant amounts of time at the cutting table or butcher block, learning to prepare wholesale and retail cuts, and value-added products like sausage, they also visit slaughterhouses, local and sustainable farms and restaurants, and spend time behind the counter of Fleisher’s retail shop in Kingston.
The program is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for the casual consumer interested in learning how to break down a chicken. For starters, the price tag is $10,000, a figure that Josh and Jessica are quick to justify: The product that apprentices train on is not a cheap or expendable one—the Applestones work exclusively with local farmers whose sustainably raised, pastured animals command a deservedly high price. “Say you’re at bartending school, and you screw up a drink,” Jessica explains, “You pour it down the drain and you lost two dollars. If you screw up a piece of meat, it could be thousands. We just can’t reorder the same piece of meat and have it there the next day.” The cost also serves, in a way, to separate the fervent from the fanciful. “When someone lays $10,000 on the table,” says Josh, “you know they’re going to take it seriously.”
The work truly commands the gravity and commitment that $10,000 ensures. The Applestones guarantee that by the end of the program, apprentices will be able to butcher a lamb, a pig and a steer, taking the animal from whole carcass down to quarters and then “case-ready” cuts. Apprentices are fitted out with “armor” (an actual chainmail apron that Josh describes as “a metal teddy”) and an array of razor-sharp knives. Many find the work to be extremely demanding, both physically and mentally. “This is not for someone who bought a ham at the farmers’ market and wants to learn to debone it,” says Jessica.
So far, the program has attracted a wide-ranging group of people interested in “dragging a knife across a carcass.… I thought most people would be 18 or 20 years old, and fresh out of the CIA,” says Jessica. “But everyone has been in their mid-30s or -40s.” They come with different goals and levels of experience, and from all sides of the food world. Tom Mylan of Brooklyn’s Marlow & Sons was one of the first to be trained by the Applestones and has opened his own retail butcher shop, Marlow & Daughters. The writer Julie Powell, of Julie & Julia fame, has written a book, soon to be released, in which she details her experience with the program. There was a chef who wanted to make his restaurant more sustainable, and a butcher from Whole Foods who desired to get deeper into the craft. Still others don’t come from the food world at all. Jessica has been discussing the program with a Chicago lawyer who has decided to give up law in favor of doing something with his hands. His father, it turns out, was a butcher, and he’d like to bring back the family business.
True mentorship, of course, takes time, and Joshua and Jessica are committed to not only passing on a craft, but to preserving its integrity. The program is designed to accommodate only one apprentice at a time, allowing for careful and deep instruction. If apprentices don’t feel comfortable by the end of eight weeks, they stay longer. Often, they stay in the Applestone’s home. “You can never beat one-on-one,” says Joshua. For Bryan Mayer, a young butcher from Brooklyn who received a grant to participate in the Fleisher’s program, that kind of depth of study makes all the difference. “This is not just another notch on my belt,” he says. “This is work I was meant to do.”
Mayer had been handling meat for years as a chef and butcher, but had a sense that there was more to it than what he’d experienced. “I had learned how to do it all,” he says. “But not how to do it right. I’d seen a hanger steak that needed to be cleaned up, but not a hanger steak that was still attached to the animal.”
This fall, Bryan Mayer will take what he’s learned back to the Green Grape, a specialty food store in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. As for what will change for his butcher shop after his graduation from the program, he is matter-of-fact: “I’d have to say, everything.”
The most valuable part of the experience for Mayer, though, was not in learning to properly break down a cow or a pig, but in the sense of mentorship he found. “I don’t know if it’s fatherly or big brotherly, but I feel that Josh has really taken me under his wing,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll go and learn from this guy and then I’ll leave and it will be done. I didn’t expect to make such close friends, to become such a part of this community.”
The overwhelming majority of those interested in the program are men, something Jessica would like to see change. “The testosterone levels in this business are off the charts,” she says, laughing. Both she and Josh believe that women are as suited to the business as men, regardless of strength. “Women are sometimes more skilled cutters,” she says. “They’re more exacting, they don’t try to muscle through things, and they work with gravity.”
Whether their students are male, female, lawyers or chefs, the Applestones are just happy to be in a position to pass on a trade that has been fast disappearing. “We believe this knowledge shouldn’t die,” says Jessica, as she recalls the butchers of old who taught them when Fleisher’s was just beginning. “These guys have this incredible knowledge; they could take an animal apart with their eyes closed, and yet there was no need, no call for what they knew.” Only 50 years ago, every market had its own butcher, a respected community figure whom the consumer looked to for advice, conversation and custom-cut roasts. It was these men who were the Applestones’ teachers, and whose wisdom they bring to their shop and their students.
In today’s supermarket culture, Saran-wrapped packages of hamburger and hanger steak are still the norm, but there are signs that public consciousness is shifting. In the years since they opened their shop, Joshua and Jessica have witnessed a steady rise in interest in local, sustainable food, more and more customers coming through their door seeking to understand the source of the food on their plates. Their hope is that interest is growing fast enough to support many more stores like Fleisher’s, and graduates of their program who will be starting them. “There is a demand for this now,” says Jessica, citing, with a chuckle, a recent New York Times article that dubbed young butchers the rock stars of the food world. For Joshua, it’s simply an example of passion translating into success. “We make it look cool, sexy and easy because we love it,” he says. “We couldn’t do anything else.
The couple is often asked if they’re concerned about competition, and their reply is swift and sure as a knife stroke: “What competition?” They believe that what they are doing is not only right, but should be replicated. “This is the way people should be eating,” says Jessica. “The more people we can get out there who are doing this, the better. I would love there to be this kind of store everywhere.” As for expanding to multiple locations themselves, they’re not really interested. The couple opened a second location in Rhinebeck a few years back, but ended up closing it to simplify the operation, a move that feels right to both of them. “We’re never gonna be able to do 10 stores,” says Josh. “And we don’t want to. You lose the control of it, the uniqueness of the store.” Instead, they hope to see 10 stores opened by their students, and then 10 more.
The nature of Fleisher’s Meats has set it apart in a world in which meat production has been so industrialized, so mechanized that most consumers have no idea where the cuts that they purchase come from, and the days of a community butcher in every town, with his or her blood-stained apron and cooking suggestions at the ready, is largely a nostalgic afterthought. With the apprenticeship program, as with their business as a whole, the Applestones are out to change that. “[A butcher shop] is like a church or a temple, it’s a part of a community, but it’s something that’s been so long gone that people don’t even realize it,” says Josh. “Of course, once it’s back, people can’t believe they lived without it.”
Those old-school butchers who brought their skills and passion to Joshua and Jessica’s table six years ago would be proud. And perhaps now they can sit back and rest easy in the knowledge that a new generation has taken up the cleaver and the cause.
A TIP FROM YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD BUTCHER In the days of neighborhood butcher shops, consumers relied on their butcher to guide them toward choice but less expensive cuts, or to suggest the best roast for a Sunday dinner. For Josh and Jessica, that relationship is a crucial one. It’s not about selling the customer on the most expensive cut—after all there’s only one fillet in a many-hundred-pound beef carcass—it’s about the dialogue, and about education.The Applestones, and their apprentices, have a “nose to tail” philosophy, focused on utilizing every piece of meat on a carcass and helping customers see the value in it.
“We’re really surgeons, one of the goals is to get “butchers” to look for unusual cuts and know what to do with them, to get excited about using them to replace other popular cuts that people look for,” says Josh. “Fillet is expensive and in high demand.We pull out a small muscle called the “teres major”—this is the second-most tender muscle in the animal, a great one to substitute for a fillet—less cost and same effect.”
