German butcher Lisa Willert is proud to keep Christchurch’s oldest butchery going. She gives Shanti Mathias a quick tour.
Lisa Willert’s six-year-old daughter understands her mum’s work solely in terms of the TV show Peppa Pig. That makes sense: Willert is a butcher, the owner and operator of Everybody’s Butchery in Addington, Christchurch. “When the meat plant guy rings while we’re driving to school, she screams from the back, ‘can we please have Peppa Pig?’” Willert says, laughing.
We’re talking in the back of the butchery, the concrete floor just cleaned, although an iron tang of blood remains in the air. Willert bought Everybody’s Butchery when she was 23, a few years after she moved to New Zealand from Germany. Twelve years later she’s still operating it. Before that, though, the shop had a succession of owners: it’s been open since 1906, always on the same premises. Today, the small shop has a bright orange sign with a quirky stained glass of a bull by the door and herbs growing in the window, accompanying the cabinet full of meat and a fridge stocked with German staples like sauerkraut and mustard.
Willert trained in Germany. “One granddad was a butcher, and the other was a baker. My cousin wanted to be a baker so I decided to become a butcher,” she says. While she’s now lived in Aotearoa for nearly two decades, she still sees her work as a German butchery, rather than New Zealand-style. “In Germany, they don’t add flour or anything to bind the sausages, so all sausages are gluten free.”
A lot of Willert’s most loyal customers have particular dietary requirements for their meat. As well as gluten free products, she also caters to paleo and keto diets, which she sees come and go. “I don’t judge people – if you’re on your carnivore diet and you’re much more healthy for it, go for it,” she says.
Another core group of customers are hunters: Willert has a homekill license, and people bringing in meat accounts for about a third of their business. Processing home kill is a lot of work: meat purchased from meat plants is inspected for safety and to check there are no diseases, but meat people catch themselves hasn’t been through all of these processes. Willert’s bevy of steel machines, many imported from Germany, have to be fully cleaned and sterilised before a batch of hunted meat can go through them. “We’ve got lots to do at the moment, because the roar is on,” she says. (The roar is the red deer breeding season where stags call for a mate, making them easier to find.)
She pulls up a video on her phone: she took some photos of the sausage-making process for a 12-year-old who shot her first deer last week. The meat twirls out of the mincer (equipped with a grate to keep fingers out of the way – “they didn’t have that in the old days”), then spins around a giant, automatic mixing bowl, the spices and salt combining with the mince. Then it’s the sausage maker’s turn: as the meat fills the sausage casing, Willert’s fingers spin it into individual sausages, with the confident hands of someone who has done this thousands and thousands of times. Since she’s talking to me, she says, she may as well do some work: she places a batch of sausages into the steam cooker, then I follow her to the cramped yard, where some salami has been hanging in the smoker. She pulls the meat out to give it time to cure, and the smell of smoke and umami drifts in the air as we walk back inside.
“That’s definitely my favourite part, thinking of new flavours for the saussies,” Willert says. “Other butcher shops buy pre-mixed flavours, but we do it all here.” This gives her lots of freedom to experiment: Willert sold garlic flavoured biersticks for 12 years, then decided it was time for a change. “Three weeks ago I decided to go back to spicy ones, because customers kept asking if we can make them spicy,” she says.
Everybody’s Butchery’s long history means that customers trust Willert in a way that corporate food production could never facilitate: she knows the people who eat her food, and they know her. Sausages from Everybody’s Butchery are about $3 each; something similar from the supermarket might be more like $2 each. This can mean going to great lengths to customise products for people. “I have one customer who can’t handle salt or spices, so he gets sausages with just Himalayan salt and nothing else. I gave him salami last week, which he’d never get in a supermarket, because no-one would care about what he needs. But even if we’re just making two salamis, we want to keep you happy.” Another customer, a vegetarian 364 days a year, makes an annual visit for a steak. “It’s always at the same time – it’s very strange, but it works for her.”
Willert also facilitates people with lots of meat to give food to those in need: one hunter regularly donates surplus meat he’s caught to Delta Community Trust, an organisation that supports people in Richmond, Christchurch. Willert boxes mince or sausages into portions for two or four people and the trust picks it up – fresh venison isn’t usual fare for community food boxes, but it’s very appreciated. The action has inspired other hunters to donate extra meat, too. “We know it’s a trusted organisation because Malcolm [the original hunter] deals with them and has done so for years,” Willert says.
When Willert first moved to New Zealand and told people she was a butcher, many people assumed she worked at a meat packing plant – not that she owned and ran a shop. “Of course, I do do meatpacking,” she says. “I do book work, I sell food to people. I don’t just have a meat and sausage job, I have thousands of jobs!” We walk back to the front of the shop, and Willert places her newly-finished sausages on a hook so people can see it for sale. The jaunty pig sign outside stays steady in the wind, and another day in Christchurch’s oldest butchery continues.
