EQUALIZING YOUR MEAT BUYING
One so often hears the remark, “I wish someone would invent a new animal.” The housewife is tired of ordering beef, mutton, pork or veal day after day. Too often she orders only the roasts, steaks or chops from these typical animals and then complains because her meat bill is high. This idea of lack of variety in fresh meats is all because of the unsound and uninteresting habit of buying the same cuts over and over again.
For every loin of beef there are several other cuts besides the extra portions, such as heart, liver, kidney, brain, etc. In these lie possibilities for many distinctive dishes and interesting flavors.
While there are not so many cuts of pork and lamb, there are great possibilities for variety in the preparation.
Nine out of ten home managers have believed for years, as do some even now, that the more expensive and most tender cuts of meat must naturally be most nutritious and that the cheaper, long fibered cuts are to be discarded or left for the butcher to dispose of, not realizing that their purchase of the tender cuts only, forces prices of these cuts high enough to cover the cost of the carcass. We are grateful that our leading dietitians of today are teaching women the truth: that the cheaper cuts of meat are exactly as nutritious as the tenderer cuts, if not more so, because the blood is drawn to the parts in which the muscles are constantly used, thus continually rebuilding the tissue.
In a dressed beef carcass of 700 pounds there are about 200 pounds of prime meat. The loin of the hind quarter, composed of sirloin, porterhouse, and club steaks, and the prime ribs of the fore quarter, are the commercial cuts most tender and easily prepared, and so are most in demand. Your butcher orders the cuts you demand. If you neglect the cheaper cuts and extra meat portions, he will not order them, and the expense of their production will be distributed over the cuts in demand.
An economically sound buying campaign would be a resolution by the housewives to use in its regular order every cut on a side of meat before reordering a cut. One of the extra meat portions could well be every third meat purchase.
In order to secure the most satisfactory cuts of meat, marketing should be done in person. Before this can be done with any degree of satisfaction, the buyer should be familiar with the various cuts of beef, pork and mutton.
The meal is planned around the meat dish, as a rule; so it is most important to select the main meat dish with greatest care.
HOW TO SELECT MEAT