A collection of books can speak strongly of a person’s habits and inclinations. The care or lack thereof with which the books are piled and stacked can be an admittance of a secret passion or an overbearing censure of guilt. The names of authors branded onto the spines are left gasping in plain view, waiting to be judged: their font, their colour, their lineage. Books are the single most beautiful contribution that humanity has offered the planet: they are the playground of words, the dating network for single ideas seeking an appropriate partner and they are the kiln inside of which our better and worse doctrines are cured.

The following is a glimpse into The Healthy Butcher Library; the oldest piece of equipment we have at the shop. Like the meat, it has grown organically over time and it is utilized just as much as our cleavers and scimitars. The pages of these books are opened to illustrate to customers how a dish can be plated after they have invested their weekend braising lamb shanks.  The spines are cracked in search of cooking techniques and oven temperatures that will yield the supplest slow roasted pork belly. And sometimes, these books are rummaged through in desperation: “What will I do with all these pigs’ ears? We never get the ears. Oh no! Oh, look at this. A Cold Salad of Slow Smoked Pigs Ears, just what Torontonians have been waiting for.”

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The most significant hurdle facing sustainable agriculture in Ontario is the disparity in consumption between primary cuts of meat and tertiary cuts of meat. Intensive broiler barns containing complexes of chicken cages will always exist if skinless and boneless chicken breast continues to dominate our collective consumption habits. And they are just habits. This problem is better addressed by British writers, and Fergus Henderson has made a career, and many a menu, out of balancing the scales by promoting the tertiary cuts and offal meats of each and every domesticated animal we consume. At first mention, Henderson writes, “it would seem disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast: there is a set of delights, textural and flavorsome, which lie beyond the fillet.”

In fact they are usually packaged near the stomach, directly under the fillet… or right beside the throat. Fergus Henderson is the mastermind behind St. John, the international culinary destination for the most dedicated offalophiles, where bread is served with marrow butter and thymus gland is delicately dredged and flash fried.

The most valiant culinary effort of recent years, Bones is a triumphant publication that encourages all cooks to refurnish their meals with the humility and flavour of ill forgotten bones. McLagan’s argument is two fold: first, bones provide all cooked meats with more flavour and moisture, making for a tastier and more satisfying meal; second, we pay for the bones whether we use them or not, so better to reap the benefits than be wasteful about such a valuable commodity. Pricing our meat at The Healthy Butcher, I can tell you this latter point is true. The cost of all the bone we discard in the organic bins is built into the cost of boneless steaks. This is true of all butcher shops. The best way to reduce the cost of meat for all of us is to use the animal more holistically. In her introduction she confesses that writing the books was done in effort “to solve the problem”.

The two recipes I like most are Pork Cooked with Spiced Honey and Lamb Ribs with Beans and Spinach. The first time I met Jennifer, she asked me for lamb ribs and I said, “What ribs?” as though lambs didn’t have ribs.

Unlike any other book to be found in the Cooking section, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking is a canonical reference for the chemistry, biology, anthropology and etymology of foodstuffs and cooking techniques. There are no recipes here, but it elucidates a soufflé better than Rummy knows the known knowns and unknown knowns. “No cookbook,” he writes, “can foresee and forestall all the emergencies and mistaken turns that an ingenious amateur can invent.” Understanding the molecular happenings of dry aging beef helps to ensure that the process is followed to the best benefits. Armed with knowledge, all mistakes become lessons and students become teachers in good order.

While this book can be technically challenging, I find that rereading specific passages with embarrassing frequency is analogous to perfecting cooking techniques or challenging dishes. It takes more than one pass to understand the entirety of certain sections, but the reward, like perfecting that Bouillabaisse is a lifetime of sustenance.

This book is the most indispensable resource I have. It is the first thing I give to young apprentices and when it was given to me, it changed the way I lived my life entirely. Humourous, candid, passionate, and active, this book reads like a Harry Potter fantasy: full of villainous meat processors, corrupt farmers, heroic young growers and prideful heritage breeds of pork. This book is non stop ride through the most important aspects of our agro-political network. Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall is the Voltaire of food writing. He is intent of making the world more like the world he likes and everything he likes is agreeable and true. “Any useful moral discussion about eating meat has to focus on the choices we have as individuals today,” he writes, and then proceeds to describe the agricultural history that brought us to these choices and the political and welfare implications of choices we have moving forward.

A farmer, a food writer, and an all around champion of strong community living, Hugh runs The River Cottage enterprise in the rural farming regions in England. A hybrid space of farming, cooking, butchering, and problem solving: The River Cottage is a culinary think tank and their meat manifesto addresses all the talking points in Toronto food circles today.

The Healthy Butcher is located at 565 Queen St. West, in downtown Toronto. 

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