Upper most in the importance of craft skills are tools. All of the world's butchery is carried out by the skill and passion of a butcher, and his knowledge of how to use a knife, saw and cleaver to disseminate an animal into its component parts.
I want to impart my passion for tools and the right tool for the job, the differences and importance of the right tools!
standard commercial cleaver
Above is a picture of a cleaver, commonly in use in most meat preparation premises from the artisan butcher to a massive processing plant.
The cleaver is functional, unfortunately with a plastic handle, which coincidentally isn't as we are lead to believe more hygienic than wooden handles!
The nature of this yellow handled tool is that it feels very thick when you use it; and to be honest a bit of a lump hammer.
This belies the difference in cleavers in times gone by when the art of using a cleaver has been overtaken by such modern machines as band saws.
Band saws are ok if your skill with a cleaver is not that great. Unfortunately the band saw is likely to heat up the surface of the muscle and speed up darkening of the cut surface. This darkening is not a difficulty to the eating quality but definitely is a difficulty to how it looks at the point of sale. My Mother would say people eat with their eyes first and they also obviously buy with their eyes.
The bandsaw also throws lots of bone dust all over the produce. I know that the cleaver breaks bone, but very cleanly and much more so than a band saw in the hands of a skilled craftsman.
A skilled craftsman with a cleaver can achieve near perfect results and minimise bone dust and bone shards to almost zero.
Practice makes perfect, well maybe not perfect but better and better.
Cleavers or choppers are a vital part of the tools required for butchery. Below is a picture of 2 plates from Douglas's Encyclopaedia; first plate is from 1905 edition the second from the 1924 edition. Both prized possessions of mine.
As you can see from this 1905 picture above and the 1924 picture below what might be described as a plethora but in fact had been honed over centuries as the right tool for the job.
The cleaver I remember using in the late seventies (shown on Fig VII), with which I became very proficient, had a wooden handle and a steel blade which went into the handle, as they say, full tang.
This cleaver was quite light, compared to the modern yellow handled example above.
The reason it was lighter is, as my good friend Mr Simon Grant-Jones a black smith, not a farrier (another story for another day www.simongrant-jones.com) said that a tool steel edge is forge welded to the more mild steel main body of the cleaver. Hence allowing for a very robust edge without the requirement for a big heavy blade.
Having looked at the plates from both books it became apparent to me that the figure 405 was the closest to the cleaver I used in my early career.
As you can see above figure 420 looks really large. Well this is the cleaver I remember being used in the abattoir in Gt Urswick by the one man team Mr Raymond Hurst known to all as strangely as Hursty.
Hursty could wield the double handed cleaver to split bodies of beef.
Unfortunately if you asked him as a farmer to cut your lamb up for the freezer that was the only tool he used. Which just goes to show the right tool for the right job or not as the case may be.
