How about some Jethro Cull?

Amongst the many scraps of knowledge that I’ve picked up since I arrived at Pilsdon in March, one of the most obscure has to be how many people it takes to carry a cow.  And so I can now divulge this to you too, dear reader : seventeen.

I know what you’re thinking - how on earth can seventeen people squeeze around a cow to begin lifting it? Let me show you how this figure is reached. First, the cow is killed, hung up for a while to let the juices out, then chopped into four quarters (putting aside the head, tail and entrails). It is then driven back to Pilsdon from the abattoir in the back of a pick-up truck, and each quarter is then slowly and awkwardly manhandled onto a large plastic sheet, with a human at each corner. These four then heft the cow-quarter still on its sheet off the truck and carry it up the path and onto a large table inside the church. Basic mathematics teaches us that if four people can (just about) carry one cow-quarter, sixteen can carry four of them. But the shortfall of one? This lucky one gets to carry the head, tail and entrails!

The eagle-eyed amongst of you will have spotted within the dense maths of the previous paragraph that the venue we used for the butchery was the church. Not perhaps the most obvious location for chopping up large animals until you consider the history of the Christian church, originating as it does from Judaism, which well into Christ’s time had animal sacrifice as a central feature of Temple worship. In this instance it was more to do with the adequate size of the hall than fulfilling any Old Testament allusions.

This particular cow went by the name of Jethro. He had been reared by us and had spent what I am sure were a very happy couple of years at Pilsdon, out in the fields during the summers and in the roomy barns during the winters, always with his fellow cattle for company. I witnessed them all being let out into the fields at the end of March after being cooped up all winter; they were just running and leaping for joy from one end of the field to the other before getting down to the real business of eating all the lush grass.

We had taken the precaution of hiring a professional butcher to spend the day showing us exactly how one does chop up a cow. It really does take that long. No two incisions appeared to be the same as he sliced up Jethro into recognisable joints, which we then bagged up for the freezer in 4lb or 2lb quantities. The lesser quality meat was chucked in a large bowl and taken up to the kitchen where I fed it into the Hobart mincer, a hulking steel machine that looked like it was made just as electricity was coming into fashion. 

Last Sunday I made a roast for twenty people out of one of his shoulders. It was delicious! There’s so much of him we won’t need to slaughter another for at least a couple of months.

Note: Owing to a lack of photographic evidence of the cow butchery I offer a photo of some pig butchery instead.

Another note : Credit to Jez Wiles for the awful pun in this week's title.