THE SATURDAY SHOP
Ruth Spencer on how to keep your meat safe
Let’s hope these lambs pass muster: these butchers in 1960 are unloading a meat truck under the careful eye of a health inspector. We can presume he’s the one in the suit. It all seems fairly cheerful, if not quite as refrigerated as we like it today. The carcasses are not wrapped in the van but are politely shrouded in white sheets before being hoisted on to rugged shoulders. We probably don’t want to know what’s in the barrel, so let’s say it’s ice.
This butcher shop is in Upper Symonds St, just down from the Khyber Pass junction with Newton Rd, the intersection just visible behind the inspector’s head. While the row of buildings on the right is largely unchanged, the butcher shop and its fellows have given way to apartment blocks. Deliveries are now more likely to come via UberEats than from behind the dubious protection of a canvas-flapped meat truck.
Although refrigerators were available in New Zealand in 1960, only 54 per cent of households had access to one and many people bought their paper-wrapped meat daily. These brown paper packages tied up with string were clearly one of our favourite things, because in the 1960s we were eating more than 34kg of mutton each a year.
Once home, you’d pop it in the ice chest or meat safe until you needed it. A meat safe could be a free-standing cabinet or built into the kitchen wall. Many younger New Zealanders have poked around an old bach and wondered at the draughty cupboard with the metal mesh window.
Those young people may feel fridges keep meat safer than a safe but, then again, no butcher ever handed them a free saveloy, so it’s not all progress.