Folks talk about the old fashioned neighborhood butcher. Nowadays, they also refer to artisan meat cutting and eco-butchering. We don't have a fancy word for it - but we do have Braults, our local meat market and slaughterhouse. They slaughter AND butcher every sheep we raise to our exacting specifications. They keep us in locally raised ground beef and we have the certainty of knowing that one package comes from one beefer that you can trace back to the pasture it grew up on. They are our source of native cut and locally raised steaks & roasts and they provide every piece of pork we marinate as chashu and serve with ramen. They are the source of some of the best homemade beef jerky in the country and as our kids grow up and travel to far flung places, Brault's jerky ends up in every care package from summer camp to graduate school. There's nowhere else I can get my pork meat ground separate from the fat so I can make specialty sausage at home and mix it to exactly my specs. And there's nowhere else I could call at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon asking for a piece of pork neck specifically for Szechuan spicy pork only to have them set one aside for me the very same day. In 30 years, I've never had another butcher understand why I didn't want everything ground into burger, why I didn't want the lamb chops cut through the bone the way they do at Brault's or why I'd dare to ask if the . All this to say that if you are in the Northeast Kingdom, you'd be crazy to come to visit Jay Peak, or Lake Memphremagog or Hazen's Notch and not swing by Brault's to fill a cooler for the ride home! If you don't have a freezer to put it in, it'd be worth going out and getting one and we count ourselves lucky to live in a place where our meat has a name and where our neighborhood butcher helps marshal it from the back 40 to the freezer with as much care and concern as we put into loving and raising it. If all you've ever had was meat from the supermarket or fancy steakhouses, you are in for a rare treat!