Back in Ireland my grandfather on my mother’s side, Seamus, was a butcher. Since he was not the eldest son (meaning that he would be given the family land) and one of his brothers was already in seminary, by the time he was fifteen, it was time for Seamus to find himself a trade. There was a slaughtering house on the very outskirts of his hometown of Ballyhaunis where he began him apprenticeship.
Later working for a small butcher shop in town, my grandfather learned everything from how to slaughter animals to making traditional Irish food. Ireland’s cuisine is heavily based upon meat; customary dishes include blood sausage, black and white pudding, Shepard’s pie, pork sausage, and meat pies.
When he was twenty, my grandfather joined the Merchant Marines in search of adventure, and ended up settling in New York after jumping ship. In New York he worked odd jobs until he saved enough money to open his own shop. He did so when my mom was a toddler, on Main Street in Rye, New York, a suburb of New York City. His butcher shop occupied the first floor of a building and the family, all eight of them, lived in the apartment above.
“The Americans in this small town had no interest in the traditional Irish meat products,” my mother explained to me. “He soon learned that the blood sausage was something he could only get his kids to eat, and he began selling more mainstream American products to keep up with consumer demand.”
And although my mom’s family didn’t have a lot growing up with the strain of being a lower-class immigrant family in New York, “there was always food on the table,” recollects my mom, which was “one of the perks of being a butcher’s daughter.” However, the benefits reaped from this position were not rib-eye steaks and juicy pork chops, but usually more tongue, gizzard, and the ends of a calf liver. Just like in Ballyhaunis, using all of the parts of the animal was imperative; it’s hard to justify wasting anything when you don’t have a lot to begin with.
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My grandfather’s job as a butcher was not just his source of income, but a part of a legacy, his own and my entire family’s. A terribly picky eater as a child, not until recently did I start eating the food that my mom makes now because of the way she was raised: liver, blood sausages, and shepherd’s pie. Now my family buys our meat and sausages at the local butcher in Sunnyside, Queens (which just happens to be a historically Irish neighborhood), and even though they’re not from her dad’s shop in Rye, according to my mom “the black pudding tastes exactly the same.”
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