TRAINING IN BUTCHERY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 June 1942, Page 4

TRAINING IN BUTCHERY

BRITISH AND ALLIED SOLDIERS. DEALING WITH ARMY MEAT SUPPLIES. Troops from Empire Army units stationed in Britain are learning to be regimental butchers at Smithfield, which in peace time is the world’s greatest meat distributing centre, and a Mecca for students of the meat trade from all over the globe. Here they are taught every branch of the butcher’s trade, often with meat which has come from their own countries. Free French, Polish and other Allied soldiers are also attending the courses, the object of which is to save meat and incidentally, shipping, by using economically all of it which comes to the Army cookhouse. There is a long waiting list of men for the three weeks’ course, held at the London County Council’s Smithfield Meat Trades Institute under' the Institute’s own instructors. With 33 hours of instruction each week, the students learn about the use and maintenance of butchers’ tools and equipment, characteristics of the various breeds of cattle and sheep, and of fresh, chilled and frozen carcases, methods of slaughter and flaying, division of quarters and carcases into various joints, cutting, boning and general preparation. Much importance is attached to the using up of fats and trimmings, and the students are taught to make fresh and cooked sausages and galantines, brining, curing and* seasoning. Hygiene is not neglected, instruction being given on methods of' preventing contamination in the handling and transport of meat. Many of the men passing through this course have been butchers in private life; others are attracted to it for the opportunity it gives of learning a trade for peace time. The Smithfield Institute, which has trained many thousands of men and still carries on this work even in war time, claims that the meat trade never has a real unemployment problem, for meat, is the last commodity to be affected by depression.