On Board LOCAL EXPERTS BREAK DOWN THE BASICS OF CHARCUTERIE AND ITS GROWING POPULARITY. BY STACI BERRY P ictures of elaborate boards overfl owing with meat and cheese and embellished with edible fl owers have taken over so- cial media feeds the past few years. But it wasn’t until I stumbled upon a pickle charcuterie board — yes, made with only pickles — that the extent to which Amer- icans have butchered (can we please stop calling it “shark-coochie”?) and, perhaps, redefi ned the term “charcuterie” became clear. “Charcuterie should just be about meats,” explains Bill Miner, chef and owner of Il Porcellino Salumi, who has dedicated his career to skillfully craft- ing and curing artisanal meats. “We do Until a few years ago, we kinda fought it and were correcting people. It’s gotten so much more popular that we fi nally quit trying to tell people what the word means — cured meats, not cheese. The misuse of the term personally bothers me, but it is what it is at this point. Peo- ple refer to basically anything on a tray as a charcuterie board.” The American evolution of the term is such a driving force nowadays that even basic business decisions are im- pacted, according to Melanie Flint, owner of Cheese Meat Board, a delivery service that recently opened a brick- and-mortar shop at 2054 Broadway. “When we fi rst launched this, we put on our website how to pronounce [char- cuterie] and the defi nition of it so that people knew what they were looking for, but it’s also why we named our company Cheese Meat Board,” Flint notes. “No one will Google charcuterie because they probably can’t spell it. They’ll say, ‘I want a cheese meat board,’ and so you’ll hours,” she says. “We would send thirty boxes out around town to different houses so they could all have their little Zoom meeting with great snacks.” Through these new deliverable options, many customers were rein- troduced to the simplicity and joy of consuming one of humanity’s oldest food pairings: cheese and meat. “There has defi nitely been a rise in popularity, and I hope that just having it as an option has contributed to that,” Flint adds. “It’s kind of a chicken/egg thing: People didn’t know that they wanted it until they saw that it was available. That’s my theory.” As people slowly began to reconnect in group settings, the desire to re-create the boards also increased. “Most high- end restaurants, for example, will never be as good at home,” Keuler notes. “A really nice plate of food is not meant to be eaten later at home, whereas a cheese and cured meat plate can stand by itself.” A grazing table prepared by Mondo Market. charcuterie boards and takeout boards here and include cheese as well. But the term ‘charcuterie’ is specifi c to curing meats. You’ll see some of these people online doing ‘charcuterie boards’ that are dessert boards. What we do is all about cured meats here.” Mike Keuler, founder of So Damn Gouda, a cheese shop in Sunnyside with over ninety cheeses on hand, agrees. “[The term is] horribly misused and completely wrong,” he admits. “It’s like calling something black when it’s white. 22 WESTWORD FOOD & DRINK 2022 fi nd us when that’s what you search.” While employees were confined to their homes during the pandemic, corporations got creative with Zoom happy hours and requested deliverable cheese and charcuterie snack boxes. “The one thing that changed for our business during the pandemic was the individual-sized box,” Keuler recalls. “I call it ‘adult Lunchables.’” Flint saw the same kind of growth. “We did a ton of virtual events for cor- porate clients that wanted to have happy Il Porcellino has also seen an uptick in meat sales for home use. “With the pan- demic, our restaurant sales declined, but retail sales increased, which balanced it out for a while,” Miner explains. “We cannot keep up with the de- mand. We’ve outgrown what we do in the last couple of years and are trying to fi gure out our next steps for growth. It’s interesting — we get people that reach out to us wanting to do classes to teach about how we make charcuterie. We do them a couple of times a year, where we break down a pig and show them how to do things.” So, as boards have become more pop- ular, have customers’ palates become more sophisticated? “Not here,” says Nicolas Farrell, co-owner of Mondo Market inside Stanley Marketplace. “Which is why our team is extremely valuable to our community and my- self,” he adds. “In-house, we have a policy of just eat continued on page 24 NICOLAS FARRELL
