Are you familiar with Butcher Shops?? Help Please!

[goadingthepen]

Okay----doing a bit of research on butcher shops. I have yet to find any butcher shops close by so I may have to rely on second hand info.

Working on story that is based around a butcher shop.

Looking for sensory details and specifics. If you have any info on butcher shops could you share please.

In particular, how do they smell...what sounds do

Comments

[melissawyatt]

I buy all of my meat from several local butchers (who--for the most part--raise the animals themselves.) Most of the stores are modern, stand-alone structures not necessarily on the farm. The only one I patronize that is on the farm is the least modern.

Inside, they are very clean, not cold but not warm. A little cooler than the temperature of a grocery store. In fact, several of them have a small selection of grocery items as well because they are in outlying areas that are far from large grocery stores. And quite frankly, they smell of raw meat and a little bit of bleach. Except for the store on the farm, which has its smokehouse attached and so smells of hickory smoke. Depending on when you visit, there is often one or two feet of smoky air hanging down from the ceiling.

I don't associate any specific noises with any of these stores. Equipment and actual butchering is kept out of sight.

All but one of them has stopped using butcher paper and everything now goes into plastic bags.

[goadingthepen]

This a great help! Thanks so much. Do they wrap the meat you select in front of you??

[melissawyatt]

Most of them do. The meat is displayed in slant-front glass cases, laid out in rows. You point to the specific cut and piece you want. They pull it out and weigh it. The one butcher wraps it in butcher paper but with a thin sheet of plastic between the meat and the paper. (You never want to store fresh meat in butcher paper for even a day or it will dry out, even in the freezer.) The other shops now just put everything into plastic bags and either twist tie them or they have those red tape dispensers where you twist the top of the bag closed and then pull that down through the tape dispenser to wrap the tape around the top of the bag.

One of the shops is now putting meats on foam trays and pre-wrapping them. Kind of ruins the whole mood, if you ask me.

Shops here sell a lot of Pennsylvania Dutch things, too, like panhaus and scrapple and hog maw (pig stomach that you take home and stuff with potatoes, cabbage and fresh sausage.) All of the shops sell tongue, brains and other organ meats, pig trotters and one sells rabbit.

[lillpluta]

Oh, we go to butcher shops all the time .. man it varies ... large? small? I'll try to describe the ones I can remember... we always try to find a "Bacon Store" wherever we move. It varies from wood floors and old cramped building to modern and all nice and white and shiny inside ... and those are ones in recent years.

[lillpluta]

The ones we go too still use butcher paper. The meat is in a display case and you ask for what you want .. and they reach in and get it and weigh it.

Let's see the one in Omaha .. you might have been able to see the grinders in the back..kinda behind a window. That was the one with wooden floors. Had things like potato salad and pickles in addition to prepackaged stuff and the raw meat in the cases.

I haven't been inside the one here .. but the meat is generally wrapped in paper. Same way with the one in Oklahoma.

So there ya go .. those are all MidWest/SouthWest sorta places.

[goadingthepen]

THANK YOU! I would have never gotten wooden floors. Hmmm.

[mela_lyn]

Are you looking for old fashioned or contemporary? I've been to a more butcher warehouse.

But what I remember:

metallic smells of the steel hooks and chains hanging from the ceiling, and the coppery tang of old blood

moist air, frigid, gusting around as the fans run

cows and pigs halved and hanging, innards taken out, feet and heads removed

lots of white paper packages - the sliced, ground, and chopped pieces of meat waiting to be frozen or already frozen and ready to be bought

cardboard boxes and the smell of moist cardboard

That's about it...

[goadingthepen]

More old fashioned. It is at least 16 years in business. So maybe somewhere in between.

Thanks!

[whitehousemom]

The one we used to go to before we moved was a shop in a very old strip mall, very dated. The cases on the floor of the shop were the old fashioned freezer cases the grocery stores used to have, where you could just lean over them and pick what you wanted. Those cases had frozen, pre-packaged meats like chicken breasts, sausages, pork chops, hamburger meat, etc. They were in white boxes, kind of like donuts would come in. With a label on the box telling you what it was

[goadingthepen]

I love the swinging door!

Thanks for all the info.

[susan_schmid]

The smell has an iron-scented tang to it. A slightly organic metallic smell. Bleach. Seasonings like paprika and sage. One I used to shop at also sold a huge variety of unusual cheeses. No meat hanging, all neatly displayed. Also some game-in season-pheasant, venison, wild duck.
Clean, but shabby, butchers aren't much into decor.
A good butcher, like a meat locker (these tend to be more rural) will hand wrap your choices weighed in designated amounts. For example-you can get six pounds of ground beef and have them wrapped in half pound allotments.
A family-owned enterprise. And I remember a cork board full of local garages sales, church suppers, school plays etc. (This would have been a decade ago, now I simply live too far away to shop there or I still would.)

One thing about shopping at the butchers, the cuts are generous and it's very easy to buy more than you need.

[kathyerskine]

Our local butcher has the glass case in front, scales on top of the (very high) counter, and smells like raw meat. They use butcher paper if you ask for it, which I do, and I love the whirring sound of the paper being pulled off the role and rip-snap sound of it being torn off. Sometimes in the back of the shop they've got the electric slicer going and they're cutting up hunks of meat.

Good luck with this, Sheri!

[goadingthepen]

Nice sounds. Thanks Kathy!

[goadingthepen]

The cork board with ads on it. Nice image to use! Very rural to me. The portion detail is good too.

Thanks a ton!