The Art of Purveying 2

This is going to be a lengthy series, because Mark and I really like our food and beverage purveyors.
         This post is for those who are into meat eating. If you’ve read Mrs. Talling’s Pig before, you know that I have some trepidation and some moral qualms, but I do enjoy seeing somebody enjoying their food, even if it is the charred flesh of a fellow creature. Maybe I should change the name of this blog to “The Biggest Hypocrite in the World.”

Here are a couple of places out in Brooklyn, our late, lamented home borough. Not in Park Slope, which was our neighborhood until it got so genteel we couldn’t afford to live there anymore, but in one of the neighborhoods we had to bike through in order to get to the Brooklyn Bridge. I guess these markets fall on either side of the Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens divide.

Paisanos Meat Market, 162 Smith Street Brooklyn, NY 11201.  Paisanos sits on Brooklyn’s “restaurant row,” which is what Smith Street came to be known as after William Grimes deemed Grocery a serious restaurant back in 2000. Now, when I walk down Smith Street from Carroll Gardens to Cobble Hill, especially on a Monday night, I always think, there can’t possibly be enough people eating dinner in the entire city of New York to keep all these bars and restaurants afloat. I’m sure I’m showing my age; by now the real, cutting edge “restaurant row” is probably in Bushwick, Canarsie, or East New York.

Paisanos pre-dates them all, having been in business for nearly half a century. Once again, the posts of some Yelpers and Chowhounders have been disdainful, insisting that the butchers in this shop have not all mastered their craft, but I am thrilled by this place, principally because they cut the meat to order. You tell them how thick you want the steak, and they take that big ole hunk of cow over to the bandsaw, and, voila, your two-inch steak, madam. They also sell a nice selection of sausages. Of course, Mrs. Talling’s Pig likes it when I bring back a brown paper package from this place (although, sadly, it’s not tied up with string). He likes the steak; I like the sizzle.

G Esposito’s and Sons Pork Store, 357 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231. Speaking of pigs. . . . so, you hopped on your bike, took the 9^th Street Bridge across the Gowanus and you’re tooling down Court, feeling a little peckish, when you see this giant, kind-of-sinister-looking pig wearing a chef’s hat, beckoning to you from a storefront. Actually, I’m thinking you probably shouldn’t be tooling down Court Street FROM the 9^th Street Bridge, because I think it’s a one-way street that goes in the opposite direction. . . .but I digress. At any rate, you’re feeling hungry and like you deserve to be because you’re biking, and the Pig is strangely compelling. So, you go into his store—which, 5 seconds of painstaking research reveals, has been around since 1922—and you get the prosciutto bread. It’s a heavy loaf, studded with nubbins of pork. That’s for now. You think you’re not going to eat the whole thing, but by the time the bike ride is over, so is the bread. You also get store-made hot soppresseta. That's for later. It’s spicy and chewy, and it tastes like an animal. But, in a good way! If you’re going to be a meat eater, this is an honest way to do it.