Marbled raw beef cuts on a dark surface beside a cast-iron pan

The butcher's chart

Where every cut comes from

The same handful of muscles do the same jobs on every four-legged animal we sell. What changes is how hard each one worked, and for how long.

Beef

The widest gap of any animal between the tender end and the tough end.

Pork

Half the animal is transformed by salt rather than by heat.

Lamb

Young enough that the shoulder roasts instead of braising.

What a primal actually is

A primal is the first division a butcher makes once the carcass is split — a large section taken off along the skeleton, before anything is trimmed into steaks, roasts or chops. There are only a handful per animal, and every retail cut you have ever bought came out of one of them.

Which primal a cut came from tells you more than its name does. A muscle that held the animal up, or moved it around, is dense with connective tissue and needs hours of low heat before it gives way. A muscle that sat along the spine doing very little arrives tender and is destroyed by that same treatment. The names change between shops and between countries; the anatomy does not.