The full taste of meat.

IN HIS PLEASING BOOK about the domestic lives of our pioneers, Black Kettle and Full Moon, Geoffrey Blainey notes that in the 1890s the average Australian ate meat for three meals a day, consuming more than twice as much meat as the average Englishman and American, four times as much as Germans and Frenchmen.

Blainey quotes the poet Vincent Buckley, retrospectively advising Irish immigrants arriving here during the Great Famine

   ... to forget the saints' wells and the music
   And to learn the full taste of meat.

Have we kept our grip on this noble tradition? I was offered chops for breakfast last September, on the buffet table at the Country Club Hotel in Kununurra, Western Australia, but had already placed my girlie man poached eggs on my effete slice of toast and feebly concluded that chops wouldn't match. I don't think I was distracted by thoughts of saints' wells. It was more a case, I guess, of an old codger's being captive to habit and perhaps to a wife with residual minceur prejudices.

An encouraging sign that our carnivore heritage lives is that, of all the specialty retailers, butchers seem to have survived the onslaught of the supermarkets best.

To get reassurance about this, I engaged in the following conversation (vegans should turn quickly to another page) with Allen Wilcox, seventy-two, who with his cousin Keith Wilcox, sixty-one, runs Wilcox's Quality Meats in Sydney, assisted on most days by Keith's mother, Jean, eighty-six. The business was started by Allen's and Keith's grandfather in 1900.

Your shop always seems full of cheerfulness.

Allen Wilcox: Most butchers' shops are cheerful. People come in knowing what they want and looking forward to a good meal. They're in a happy mood. Our chopping and slicing is quite interesting to watch. It's a conversation starter. So the job's fun. Needs to be because it's pretty hard work--breaking beef carcasses and lamb carcasses into their various cuts, a lot of lifting and hauling, in and out of the cold room, standing on concrete floors. Arthritis is the butcher's curse.

Not lopping bits off yourself and one another?

No. I've had a few nicks but only one bad cut. Here on my forearm.

That's grisly!

It wasn't as bad as it looks. Blood gets under your skin and has to be got out. So the scar looks a bit alarming. I didn't do it in the shop. I was teaching butchering at TAFE, where they didn't have all the right equipment.

When did you get into the trade?

In 1947, aged fourteen, straight from school. Keith started at the same age.

Animal corpses didn't give you the creeps?

Not a bit. We were used to it. Keith and I both helped out in the shop while we were still at school. We loved being there in the shop with our parents, being useful. During the war my job on Saturdays was to cut the coupons out of people's ration books.

Oh, so Australians did go through a period when they had to do without meat? How did they handle it? They weren't too deprived. Actually, I don't think there was much need for rationing. There was plenty of meat, at least in New South Wales. Possibly rationing was psychological, reminding us we were at war. Butchers were on individual quotas but the government didn't control the meat until it was killed. A lot of animals walked into Sydney without leaving much of a trail. If you could pay cash you could put in orders to supplement your quota before the meat actually fell over.

The only meat that vanished completely was pork. The Yanks loved their pork so they got it all. One day an American soldier came by the shop and swapped a pig's head for a leg of lamb. Our family hadn't been big pork eaters but I remember my mother's saying how nice it was to have the smell of cooking pork in the house, even if it was only a pig's head, after so long without it.

Butchering is a bit different now from when you started?

Sure is. My grandfather used to cut big beef carcasses, 600 pounds, if you'll let me think in pounds. For all those family roast dinners. When my dad came in it was down to 400 pounds There was now a griller under the stove top. Everybody wanted to grill. With smaller beef carcasses you got more grilling parts--quicker and easier to cook. Six-hundred-pound beef would be two years old, and the beef that people wanted would be about twelve months, much tenderer.

Better tasting?

Not really. Not at all, as a matter of fact. It was softer and people could add condiments and seasoning for taste. Older beef actually eats better but the gristle gets heavier. You've got to chew harder. These days, beef is pretty much custom made to popular taste. Every beast is lot-fed. They come off the pastures at nine months and are fed in the lot for 100 days. The Japanese love their beef marbled with fat, so they lot-feed their cattle with grain--and beer. We've gone off fat so we feed ours on meal mix--like taking a baby off mother's milk and putting it on formula. Everybody seems to have their own recipe for meal. If you could afford it you could probably write down your personal specifications for a steer, with emphasis on your favourite cuts, and some lot-feeder would supply it to your design. Incidentally, practically all lamb and pork comes from female animals but, with beef, a good steer is as good as a good cow.

Well it's nice to hear of the blokes winning one, but that's certainly doing it the hard way.

I'd say so. I don't really understand the physiology but there's no question pork and lamb from females tastes best.

Lamb's changed as much as beef?

In a big way. Before World War Two, we used to eat what was left after the merino had given up its wool. After the war, the CSIRO led the way in breeding sheep for meat. The first strain they did much with was the Southdown. Beautiful shape from a butcher's point of view. Bubble legs. But the Southdown was on the fatty side. The CSIRO did a lot of experimenting with crossbreeding and eventually came up with today's Australian meat lamb. Fast-growing, superb flavour. Chinese immigrants usually detest the smell and taste of lamb. But after they have been here a while and have tasted Australian lamb a few times they are rapt.

The other big change is that, whereas lamb was a springtime event, there is now a second lambing season. But second season's lamb is not quite as good as spring lamb. The mother eats the spring grass and it produces beautiful milk. At sixteen weeks you've got tender lamb with the most delectable flavour. Past February the grass dries off so the milk is not as nutritious.

What about hogget and mutton?

Not used any more. Only lamb. Some smart guys--not many--may play around but "lamb" is always what it says on the label.

The Australian appetite for meat has never flagged? Not so you'd notice. This shop had 550 regular customers twenty-five years ago, It still has over 500. For a while, after World War Two, spaghetti looked like it might be the butchers' enemy. My mum liked to keep up with things. For my twenty-first birthday party she cooked a great pile of spaghetti bolognese. She told us, "If nobody eats it, I can always bury it." Every skerrick got eaten. But people decided that, beaut as spaghetti was, they needed meat for the complete life. Same with sushi and stuff like that. But big changes have happened in the past fifteen to twenty years.

The anti-fat movement?

Yeah. That's part of it. In the old days you didn't mind a good bit of fat on a rump steak. In fact, you ate the fat first. Not any more. People are very conscious of their weight and shape.

But we don't seem much thinner?

Well, we've got proof now it's not the fault of butchers' meat. Could be we never were to blame for the Australian pot belly. Maybe it was those pots of beer. And the takeaways. Pity I can't get some fat back on those rump steaks.

Fat's where the taste is, isn't it? Pork crackling, for instance ...

I agree. That's probably why I'm on cholesterol pills. But fat is just waste nowadays. The customers don't want it. We've got to take it off. Hear that noise? That's fat going into our dumpster. Still, even without fat, we get better meat now than we've ever had. The diesel semi-trailer made the difference. Stock used to be walked or brought in by rail to big abattoirs, worn out by the journey. But the diesel engines are so powerful they can operate freezing chambers on the semi-trailers. Slaughtering is done close to where the stock is raised and the meat is chilled on the road. Gets to us fresh and flavourful. Wonderful, really.

But you can't persuade people to put more work into cooking this terrific meat?

No way. Families are smaller, people have more activities. A leg of lamb used to be a leg of lamb. Now, as often as not, we take the bone out and butterfly it, so it lies flat, can be grilled if you like. For dinner parties, people go for racks of lamb or veal rather than a roast. You've got to carve a leg. Once we'd do seventy or eighty five-pound rolled roasts a week, a great way of packaging lean and fat. But who'd think of wrestling with all that string and all those skewers now? You could probably base grounds for divorce on a rolled roast. The demand for cheaper cuts is down. They need slow, long cooking--in stews, for example. Slow cooked, the sinew that makes meat tough becomes jelly. Delicious. There's more money around. People go for the expensive, easy-to-cook cuts. They don't hesitate about paying forty bucks a kilo for scotch fillet.

I never see any of the great meat delicacies around your shop ... you know, brains, sweetbreads, kidneys, tripe, lamb tongue.

You mean offal. That's disappearing from butchers' shops. Used to be the cheap meat meal. I reckon a lot of people were forced to eat things like tripe when they were kids and now won't have a bar of it. Lamb tongue is too fiddly, all that struggle to wrestle the skin off and what do you get? A couple of bites. We sell a few ox tongues. There's a return for effort from them.

Why haven't the supermarkets swamped butchers?

It's the old contest between mass-produced and tailor-made. If it's on an animal, we can get it off for you. Supermarket cuts are pretty standardised. Our meat quality is more consistent. Pick up an unsatisfactory packet of meat in a supermarket and you have no butcher to complain to. You made the selection. Your hard luck. Meat sweats in those packets and loses freshness.

We depend mostly on knife and chopper. Supermarkets' wholesalers, because they have such an enormous turnover, go straight to the saw. Bone dust gets on the meat and that affects freshness, too. It's why there are so many bargain specials in supermarkets. The meat's got to be sold before it goes off.

What's your best-selling item?

Sausages. Always have been. We make our own, three kinds: pork, beef with basil and tomato, plain beef. You probably don't need to ask which is most popular.

The plain ones.

Yes, they're huge. Sometimes we run out of off-cuts and have to buy stuff in. Even use chuck steak in an emergency. Probably go to fillet if we were desperate. Better than having no sausages. The snag is the national dish. Kids love them, especially the small variety, chipolatas and cocktail franks. Some shops sell nothing except sausages.

There are some pretty gruesome legends about what goes into sausages--sawdust, butcher's fingers, that kind of stuff.

No butcher in his right mind would fool around with his sausages. He'd be ruined. The only time I remember sausages being, well, faked was during the war when a few blokes who'd forgotten to supplement their quotas started filling up their sausages with pumpkin. They looked wonderful in the window but when you cooked them they turned bright orange. It's hard to get a thrill out of a bright orange sausage.

Years ago, government inspectors would come around and inspect the sausages in butchers' shops. Their big deal was stopping us putting in more than 28 per cent fat. More than 28 per cent! You wouldn't even think about it. Fat boils away when it cooks. You're not going to get many repeat orders from somebody who watches his big plump snag shrivel away to clothespin size on the grill.

What goes into sausages is top quality meat, cut away when we chop the prime joints from a carcass and then trim the special cuts in the shop. We buy ready-made meal mix from an outside supplier. It includes preservative and a dash of herbs, and helps bind the fine-chopped sausage meat. It's mostly rice flour. That makes for slightly crumblier sausages than wheat flour but I think it tastes better and is easy to work with. There's never been a complaint about the rice flour. Probably nobody ever noticed the switch from wheat to rice.

Okay, what's the finest meat you can get from any animal?

I'm very partial to lamb in the springtime, but year round it's what's called New York cut beef. It comes from the ribs up around the backbone--same general neighbourhood as fillet steak. The fillet is a little tenderer but the New York cut has far more flavour. It was called winged rib in the old days. The Americans call it standing rib roast. It was something you sold for a baked dinner but now it's cut into steaks.

Cooked how?

Grilled. No more than an inch thick--rare, medium rare, well done, whichever way you like it. Can't go wrong.

A touch of garlic?

No, no. You don't do anything to change the flavour of this meat.