Stubbs

One of the particularly yummy things Heather served as an appetizer last night was a chicken liver and brandy pate that came from the butcher shop in Matakana, which may be why it was at the top of her list of places I should check out today. So I went in to town and ended up parking, quite accidentally, right in front of it. Couldn’t miss it since the display window was filled with all things lamb: lamb racks, boned and rolled lamb, butterflied legs of lamb, lamb shanks, chops, backstraps, cutlets, steaks, chops, and rumps.

Not that they didn’t also have some lovely looking cuts of beef and pork as well as whole rabbits, quail, pheasant, and duck. But it was the lamb I was lusting after. There is, to me, nothing like a nice cut of lamb. I love that slightly gamey, grassy taste of very rare butterflied leg of lamb, seasoned with olive oil, kosher salt, garlic, and rosemary, spit-barbecued over a slow fire, the fat dripping on to the coals and evaporating as a smoky fragrance that always gets me salivating.

The Matakana butchery is actually called Stubbs Village Butchery and is owned by two guys named Dick and Bill (of course), both of whom look exactly the way you would expect a New Zealand butcher to look, which is to say beefy and a bit portly with massive shoulders and forearms.

When I was there Bill, the one without a mustache, was handing out samples of some little tidbit of meat speared on toothpicks. “Chipolata?” he asked.

I took one and popped it in my mouth. It tasted a bit like a Jimmy Dean sausage. “What’s a chipolata?” I asked him.

“Chipolata?” he repeated, saying the word in that way that people have when they’re surprised you don’t know what something is. “Never heard of chipolata?”

I assured him I hadn’t.

“What’s it taste like, mate?” he asked me.

I told him it tasted like a Jimmy Dean.

“Tastes like a Jimmy Dean?” he repeated, clearly confused. “What’s a Jimmy Dean?”

I told him it was a breakfast sausage. He smiled. “There you are, then.”

So evidently a chipolata was a breakfast sausage, though why they didn’t just call it that was beyond me. Bill said they made them here in the shop and he had beef or pork chipolatas.

“No lamb?”

“Lamb chipolata?” Bill repeated.

I nodded.

“Nah, mate. You don’t make a chipolata from lamb.”

Why not, I asked him. You seem to make everything else out of lamb.

“A bit strong for breakfast, I reckon,” he said.

Not for me. I think lamb chipolata would be just the thing for breakfast. Along with a bowl of Heather’s muesli and a strong cup of Black Dog coffee, and I told this to Bill. He nodded and thought about it for a minute and said, “Come back tomorrow morning. I’ll have some lamb chipolata for you. We’ll try it out. You bring the Black Dog.”

I plan to do just that.