For our first cut, we’re starting at the front of the hog with one of the hardest-working—and most useful—parts of the animal: the shoulder.

The pork shoulder is divided into two main sections:

1. The Butt — the upper shoulder
2. Picnic Shoulder — the lower shoulder

And yes, we know what you’re thinking.

Why is the shoulder called a butt?

Despite the name, butt or sometimes the “Boston Butt” doesn’t come from anywhere near the hog’s rear end.

The traditional explanation goes back to England, where cuts of pork were packed for storage and transport in large wooden casks known as butts. Boston became closely associated with this style of pork preparation, and somewhere along the way the name Boston butt stuck.

Whatever you call it, it’s a fantastic piece of pork.

The butt contains beautiful marbling and plenty of intermuscular fat. Because the shoulder muscles do a lot of work, the cut also contains connective tissue that softens during long, slow cooking. That combination of fat, muscle and time is what gives a properly cooked shoulder its rich flavor and fall-apart texture.

If you’ve ever prepared one of our Butt Roasts, you already know what we’re talking about.

But we get much more than roasts out of this section. At L&S, we also use it for pork steaks, ground pork and our slow-smoked pulled pork.

And then there’s the Coppa

Hidden within the neck and upper shoulder is one of our favorite muscles: the coppa, also known as capocollo.

This beautifully marbled whole muscle is separated out rather than ground or cut into steaks. We dry cure it and allow it to age for two to four months, transforming it into one of our specialty charcuterie products.

The result is rich, buttery and incredibly tender. Thinly sliced, you can actually see all that beautiful marbling running through it.

Chef’s kiss. Seriously.

It’s also a great example of why knowing where different cuts come from matters. The same shoulder that can give us a rustic pulled-pork sandwich also contains a muscle delicate enough to become months-aged charcuterie.

Moving down: the Picnic Shoulder

Below the butt is the picnic shoulder, or lower portion of the shoulder.

At L&S we use it to make a whole lot of sausage.

And we mean a whole lot.

We make more than a dozen varieties of sausage at L&S. The meat is cut by hand, mixed with each recipe’s seasonings by hand, and stuffed into casings by hand.

Some are smoked. Some are based on traditional sausage styles from around the world. Others are recipes we’ve developed ourselves over the years.

This is also the cut we use to make the pork steaks, and the incredible ham hocks.

Different seasonings, different textures, different ways of cooking them—but they all begin with a piece of the hog that most people would simply call the shoulder.

One shoulder, a lot of possibilities

That’s one of the things we love about butchery.

A butt doesn’t have to become a butt roast. The picnic doesn’t automatically become sausage. Within one primal cut are muscles with different amounts of fat, different textures and different strengths. Knowing how to separate them—and deciding what each one is best suited for—is part of the craft.

From a slow-smoked pulled pork to a dry-cured coppa that takes months to finish, we’re looking at the same general area of the hog and getting completely different foods from it.

And we’re only at the shoulder.

Next time, we’ll move a little farther down the hog and show you where another group of familiar L&S cuts begins.

Follow along with our Where Does This Come From? series as we work our way through the whole hog—one cut at a time.