The three butchers killed three pigs in total.
Three pigs produced a lot of pig blood. When people here collected pig blood, they would first prepare a bucket of water and put salt in it. When the pig blood was put in, they kept stirring… until the pig blood was completely mixed in. The pig blood mixed with salt would coagulate, and then it would be boiled and cut into pieces to become pieces of pig blood curd.
Generally, a large pot of pig blood curd made from one pig could be eaten by the whole family. Guan Baiyu’s adoptive father only wanted the blood of one pig.
The neighbors asked for the pig blood from the remaining two pigs, and they took a portion back to eat.
After the pigs were killed, the hair had to be shaved and the internal organs had to be processed. The three butchers divided the work and worked together.
Shi Zhen went to talk to the butcher from whom he had bought from twice.
He had good facial features and wore tattered clothes. He looked like a simple rural youth. Anyway, he was the kind of person who could easily make others like him and want to get close to him.
The butcher was in his thirties and his surname was Zhu. He liked Shi Zhen very much and talked to Shi Zhen while working.
These days, after some people became rich, they became more and more concerned about face. Butcher Zhu sold meat in town. Some people didn’t have a cent, so they wanted to buy some meat on credit. If they really couldn’t afford it, and had to settle for cheaper cuts of meat, these people also liked to find excuses for themselves. Some people even said the cheap meat was bought to feed dogs… The young man in front of him directly said that he had no money, and his rare honesty also impressed him deeply.
”Brother Zhu, you all kill the pigs the night before and sell them the next day? Can I learn how to kill pigs with you?” Shi Zhen asked.
To be honest, one couldn’t make much money selling vegetables, but selling meat… it should be possible to make a little more.
He remembered that when he was walking around the market, there were a lot of people buying meat, but the number of people selling meat was not that many. There were only about ten people in total. Several of them had obviously bad attitudes toward customers.
This should be a legacy of history – in the past, the meat sold in town was all from the state-operated slaughterhouse*. No matter how bad the attitude toward customers was, people would still come to buy it!
Later, the state-operated slaughterhouse was disbanded. Now anyone could sell meat, and… their attitude was still not very good.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
The population here would increase in the future, and Shi Zhen believed that selling meat would be a good business for a long time before supermarkets appeared in this town.
Of course, he wouldn’t sell meat all the time, but he had come out to make a living. And it wasn’t just himself… He managed to bring many people out of the village in his previous life, and he would do the same in this life.
Even if he didn’t sell meat in the future, he could still let people in his village sell it.
”Learn to kill pigs? You can’t sell meat even if you learn,” Butcher Zhu laughed. “We kill pigs secretly, and all the pork we want to sell must be taken from the slaughterhouse. And while it looks like there are a lot of stalls in the farmers’ market, it’s not easy to get one. It costs thousands to buy a stall.”
As soon as Butcher Zhu mentioned the slaughterhouse, people around him also started chatting.
According to regulations, meat sellers in town could not privately kill pigs for sale, because that way, they would pay less tax – currently, a pig had to pay a tax of 5 yuan, as well as a slaughter fee of 5 yuan.
Butcher Zhu and the others came out to kill pigs for others just to save on taxes and slaughter fees, so that they could earn ten more yuan per pig.
”Butchering pigs is so tiring. If I didn’t owe money for building a house, I would definitely not do this job.” Butcher Zhu sighed.
He talked about a lot of miscellaneous things. For example, the pigs in the slaughterhouse were stamped with edible paint. The pigs they slaughtered outside were not stamped, so when he took them to town to sell, he had to be careful. If he was caught, he would be fined.
And when they came out to kill pigs, they paid the same price for a pig as the slaughterhouse did. The reason why the villagers gave the pigs to them to kill instead of sending them to the slaughterhouse was twofold. First, it was because they could get the pig blood from the pigs. Second, it was because at the slaughterhouse, the villagers had no idea how much the pigs weighed after they were killed.
“When we buy pigs from the slaughterhouse, they sometimes write down the weight of the pig by a few catties,” Butcher Zhu said with a smile, “and then come over to our stall to get the meat from us.”
Nowadays, the staff in the slaughterhouse were all former employees of the state-operated slaughterhouse, and there were a lot of side deals like this.
Shi Zhen remembered that when he bought a pig tail, someone came to Butcher Zhu, and Butcher Zhu gave him a piece of meat without saying anything.
Butcher Zhu probably felt depressed, and told some messy things about the slaughterhouse. For example, the slaughterhouse killed several pigs every day, and it was all pork. Even if a pig was weighed in front of them, you could still get less, because pigs had different sizes. Their internal organs also had different weights. In the end, whoever had a good relationship with those working at the slaughterhouse would be given heavier pig internal organs, even if the pigs taken away were very small.
Pork belly, pork liver, pig heart, etc., etc., were not cheap. There was a big price difference between the internal organs of a two hundred catty pig and a one hundred catty pig! But when pigs were sold here, the price was calculated by weighing the whole pig after killing it, without the internal organs. The internal organs were just given away for free.
Shi Zhen chatted with Butcher Zhu, and the more he chatted, the more speculative he became, and he also found out all about the price of pork.
He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to become a butcher, but… Shi Zhen asked, “A pig head only costs 50 cents a catty?”
Butcher Zhu said, “If the tongue and ears are removed, it costs fifty cents a catty.”
At the end of the year, the price of pig heads would be very expensive, because local people liked to buy pig heads to worship their ancestors, but usually pig heads were very cheap. As for why they were so cheap… There were many bones in the pig head and little meat. You could buy them for 50 cents a catty. But who knew how many bones you had to remove after buying it back.
A pig head was pretty big. Most people, when they wanted to eat pork, wouldn’t buy a pig head to take home.
Shi Zhen went back to sleep after watching the pig killing. Of course, he didn’t forget to ask for some pig blood.
Everyone in the village now knew about his relationship with Guan Baiyu. Everyone was curious about him, but they had no ill intentions and didn’t mind sharing some pig blood with him.
Early the next morning, Shi Zhen went to town and bought a piece of tofu to prepare for the pig blood curd and tofu soup at night. In addition, he also bought some spices such as cinnamon and bay leaves.
He planned to save a few days’ money to buy a pig head to braise, and then try to sell pig head meat in town during the weekend.
On weekends, when children were out of school, people in town were happy to buy some delicious food for their children.
Besides… there were almost no people selling cooked food in town at this time, so there should be no problem selling pig head meat.
The most important thing was that he wouldn’t lose much money if he couldn’t sell it, and they could also eat it themselves.
As for him going to dredge up the river… If it was the weekend, he could have Guan Baiyu sell it.
Of course, this needed to be discussed with Guan Baiyu.
Shi Zhen had a plan and planned to discuss it with Guan Baiyu and Shi Xinghuo that night.
As a result, when he got home that night, he learned a piece of bad news – the man selling mud with Shi Xinghuo would no longer sell mud.
It was possible to make money by selling mud to the cement factory, but they couldn’t dig this mud randomly. Even if someone sold mud from their own land, they couldn’t dig their own land into a big pit.
In fact, selling mud was not allowed in the village, but most of the time people just turned a blind eye – digging pits was not okay, but digging a slope or something was no problem.
So it was impossible for that person to keep selling mud indefinitely.
But since he no longer sold mud, there was no need to hire Shi Xinghuo, and Shi Xinghuo was temporarily without a job.
Shi Zhen thought for a while and said, “Brother, come with me to my place of work tomorrow. I will give my job to you.”
He decided to start selling pig head meat tomorrow.
Shi Xinghuo was capable of dredging up river silt. If he handed Shi Xinghuo this job, he would be free to start a small business.
Before, he could only find a job as a laborer because a business like selling pig head meat required at least a pot and money to buy pig heads, which he did not have.
Now, he could cook food at Guan Baiyu’s house and sell it.
***
T/N: Shi Zhen’s first money-making idea! I know it’s not fancy like you see in other webnovels, but it’s realistic and I really like that about this webnovel. To start a business, he needs capital, which he didn’t have (it’s different in some ancient settings where you see the characters just go to the mountains for ingredients). Before Guan Baiyu recognized/acknowledged him, he didn’t even have a place to cook (because he’s only renting a room at Guan Jianguo’s place).
*If you’ve read novels set in the 60s and 70s of China, you should already be familiar with this. For those who don’t know, private enterprises used to be illegal and everything sold was state-run. For things like meat, even how many chickens you could raise was limited (based on the number of people in the family) and while you could raise pigs, they were not owned by you, but had to be handed in to the village to be divided. Only the state could raise livestock on a large scale and they were the only ones who could sell meat legally.
