{"product_id":"armour-and-company-pork-cuts-1910","title":"Pork Cuts","description":"\u003cp\u003e1910\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 16mo, oblong. Ff. [1] f.e., [2], 90, [4], [1] r.e.\u003cbr\u003e\nChicago\u003cbr\u003e\nArmour and Company\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOriginal wallet-style binding in brown leather over flexible boards, with rounded corners and a gilt-ruled panel lettered in gilt script on the front. Light rubbing and a small nick at the extremities. Decorative floral-patterned endpapers in green, gold, and cream; front free endpaper wanting. Ink stamp reading \"Please return to A. de Visser.\" Very good.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePocket-sized trade specification booklet, issued by one of Chicago's largest meatpacking houses to make an increasingly complex vocabulary of cuts, trims, and cures commercially exact.\u003cbr\u003e\nArmour and Company built its business in the shadow of the Union Stock Yards and by 1910 stood among the handful of firms that dominated American meatpacking. Its vast distribution system depended not simply on processing animals but on selling precisely standardized products across enormous distances. An unlikely witness to that sales culture was Dale Carnegie: before becoming famous for anything else, he sold bacon, soap, and lard for Armour across a western South Dakota territory, traveling by freight train, stagecoach, and horseback. His experience, recalled decades later in the introduction to \"Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business,\" gives a vivid picture of the commercial world for which working trade literature like this was produced.\u003cbr\u003e\nThat overseas reach is the booklet's real fascination. Its cuts are named for the markets that received them as much as for the animal they came from: Wicklow Side and Dublin Middles for Irish curers, Cumberland Middles and English Belly for England, Antwerp Backs for Belgium, and Hamburg hams cured explicitly for the German market, alongside American terms such as Boston Butts and Chicago Shoulders. Read end to end, its index becomes a small map of international commerce: Chicago pork cut, cured, and named to specifications set an ocean away.\u003cbr\u003e\nA stamp on the front endpaper, \"Please return to A. de Visser,\" provides an appropriate trace of its working life: a small technical reference meant to be consulted, circulated, and returned.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe booklet ppens with a diagram of a hanging hog carcass, its outline divided and numbered into nine named primal sections - hind foot, ham, rib belly, fat back, pork loin, cala ham butt, California ham, fore foot, and neck - establishing the vocabulary the individual cut entries that follow depend on. The work proceeds cut by cut, each entry pairing a halftone photograph of the finished cut with a short paragraph of exact butchering specification.\u003cbr\u003e\nA closing compound specification, Mess or Extra Mess, is built by formula rather than cut fresh from the carcass, from portions of light canning carcasses: Plates in five styles at twenty to thirty pounds average, Chuck in four styles, Rump Butt, and Flank, ordinarily two pieces of each kind to the barrel. A separate diagram elsewhere among the leaves divides a lamb or mutton carcass into leg, loin, rack, and stew rather than pork, its relation to the surrounding content not established.\u003cbr\u003e\nAn alphabetical index of cuts and their locations closes the volume, mixing American house terms with export specifications for the Irish, English, Belgian, and German markets.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eArmour's ambitions stretched far beyond Chicago, cutting and curing pork to suit markets from Dublin to Antwerp and Hamburg. And somewhere inside that enormous sales machine was a young Dale Carnegie, selling Armour's bacon and lard across South Dakota by freight train and stagecoach. We can't know whether he ever carried this particular booklet, but we rather like imagining it tucked into his coat pocket as he crossed the Dakota plains, learning the art of persuasion one sale at a time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49385897689323,"sku":"197-1910--200.00-60.00-2026","price":200.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00197_IMG_0059.jpg?v=1788994573","url":"https:\/\/fenicebooks.com\/products\/armour-and-company-pork-cuts-1910","provider":"La Fenice Antiquaria","version":"1.0","type":"link"}