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Staking Their Claim
(by Ann Heller - Dayton Daily News - August 01, 2006)
The vanishing American butcher is a reality — but also a myth.
It's true in cities that the neighborhood butcher shop is nearly extinct. And at the supermarket, butchers behind the counter are becoming as endangered as the swinging side of beef that they used to cut up into chops and roasts.
But in small-town America, butcher shops remain destinations for people willing to turn back the clock and drive a bit to buy meat — and experience a slower-paced alternative to one-stop shopping.
Many of the remaining retail butcher shops are a few miles out of town, such as Winner's Meat Farm, in the middle of corn and soybean fields five miles from Greenville. It's an A-to-Z family operation that keeps seven brothers and cousins busy at the near-Greenville and Osgood locations. The men raise the cattle, hogs and the crops to feed them.
They slaughter the animals, bone and cut up the meat, make their sausages and cold cuts, and, to top it off, smoke their hams and bacon. Once a week Mike Winner makes fresh cracklings in a giant black kettle, forming them into cakes and breaking them up into crunchy nibbles.
And, with employees, the family staffs the market six days a week, selling its signature marinated pork chops, house-made sausages, smoked bacon and hams, as well as steaks, roasts and hamburger.
Winner is a third-generation butcher. His grandfather Robert started the business in Osgood, and Winner's father and his brothers bought the property near Greenville in 1973.
"They bought it for me to go to work," Winner says. He was 19 at the time.
Now he starts his work day at 5:30 a.m., and three days a week the day begins with butchering the hogs and cattle the family has raised, plus others brought in one by one for custom butchering. The day doesn't end until the retail shop closes at 5 p.m.
"Not that I work all that time," he says, for he lives in the 1800s brick home at the front of the property. Still, they are long hours, and Winner acknowledges that his son, now a student at the University of Dayton, may not want to follow in his footsteps. He says he told his children "to go get an education and go work for someone else; they can always come back.
"But there are easier ways to make a living."
Winner handles the heaviest work — the slaughter of 1,200-pound steers and working with 375–pound sides of beef. He stays away from the saws in the cutting room, but once a week steps up to the boiling kettle of cracklings.
"We're cooking pig fat," he says, stirring the bubbling, foaming mixture and obviously enjoying it. "We step back here every once in a while and stir it. When the foam stops, they're ready to come out.
Men in the cutting room, visible behind the retail counter, work swiftly, boning out cuts of meat — a skill no longer required of city butchers who rarely encounter a bone. There are 100 years of experience between the four employes.
Winner is proud of his hams prepared in a small smoker with hickory sawdust chips.
"There's a difference between our hams and the ones you buy in the supermarket," he says. "Our hams don't have added water." That's why they are big sellers in the holiday season. He also makes a wide variety of sausages, from hot Italian to green onion sausage.
But the biggest-selling item in the meat case is Winner's marinated pork chops. The recipe is a secret, and he won't discuss how many he sells.
"But I can't kill enough hogs to keep up with the marinated pork chops," he says. The demand is so heavy he has to buy some pork.
That makes enough to stock the meat case for the customers who come from Dayton, Richmond, Ind., and even Muncie, Ind.
It's a bit of a drive, but a big step back in time.
Winner's Meat Farm is at 2259 Ohio 502, five miles outside of Greenville (take Ohio 49 into Greenville to the traffic circle in the center of town). Phone (937) 548-7513. The retail store is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, until 1 p.m. on Saturday. It is a state-inspected store. Beef is not graded and is aged a week to 10 days. Custom butchering is provided.
Contact Ann Heller at 225-2402.
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