bacon with anything

The web site Reddit.com, which gained some unwanted notoriety lately as the unwitting web host of a child pornographer, is a strange sort of social network, because of the wqy people post anything and everything there. It's like a basement full of informational debris, which, if carefully sorted, may yield some items of value.

An awful lot of what's there is the kind of interesting and totally useless knowledge I specialize in. For example, do you know why there are no good rib joints in Paris? And why do Americans wrinkle their noses when someone mentions pork stock, for soup?

It's because European butchers cut meat differently than we do here. The emphasis in Europe is on maximizing the amount of usable meat from a cadaver, so there is no cutting with saws; butchery is done with a knife and the butcher's free hand.

In the US where band-saw butchery is the rule, we get ribs with meat on them, pork chops and butts with the bones still in. French meat cutters remove any bones such as ribs with little meat on them, and throw them in the stock pot.

You can read all about it at Reddit, if you're bent that way.