NO BUTTS ABOUT IT

You may have seen large cuts of pork in the

supermarket labeled “pork butt,” but a few ninth-
grade classes in physiology would have told you that
what you were looking at was not a butt but a
shoulder. What’s up with the odd labeling?
Pork shoulder and pork butt are the same cut of
meat, and it’s an oddity of nomenclature, not
anatomy, that makes them so. Turns out that in the
early nineteenth century, New England was a pork-
production powerhouse. The loins, bellies, and hams
were eagerly snatched up by native New Englanders,
but the far less desirable shoulder cut (obviously, the
Yanks didn’t know jack about BBQ; some argue
they still don’t) was packed into wooden barrels and
shipped out across the country. The barrels came in
different sizes, but the ones pork was packed into
were of the size officially known as “butt” or “pipe.”
That’d be a 126-gallon barrel, half the size of a 252-
gallon tun, larger than a 84-gallon firkin, and twice
the size of a 63-gallon hogshead (which, incidentally,
has nothing to do with actual hogs or heads).
The pork-filled butt-sized barrels shipped out
across the country came to be known as Boston
butts, a term that was soon applied to the meat