Butcher, Prepared Foods Cook, Retail Associate
Marlow And Daughters
Brooklyn, New York, United States
I attribute working at Daughters to launching my interest in how the food we eat actually gets to our mouths. I wore many shoes at the shop, ranging from whole animal butcher to prepared foods cook, to cheese monger and occasionally dish washer. Besides washing dishes, all of these roles were customer facing, providing me with lifelong communication skills with a wide range of different cliental, possibly the most important skill I gleaned from this job. My day to day work shifted depending on the position I was working. As a butcher, I would fulfill orders our wholesale accounts made each morning, breaking down animals as needed. I would cut for the case to ensure we displayed a variety of cuts to the customer, then I would assist customers, help them pick out specific cuts and weights depending on their needs, custom cutting for them as needed. Down time would involve grinding trim, making sausages, smoking hams or bacon, assisting the other departments as needed. As a prepared foods cook I would create and execute daily prep lists, cook a variety of seasonal meat dishes, salads, condiments, and baked goods, conduct R&D for seasonal dishes or if aging produce and meat needed to be used up, and occasionally manage and execute catering orders that came up. The flexibility of this job helped me amass a wealth of information not only about produce, meat, cheese, and specialty food items but also about supply chains- we ordered whole animals directly from a select few farms and also co-ops of farms, as well as produce, and we worked with a handful of local distributors to get a curated supply of dry goods and specialty food products both imported and local.
