The meat that never spoils: occupational identity and legend decline

A big piece of rump roast assumed to be 146 years old still hangs in the stall of A. P. Smith and Brothers in the fish and meat room of Castle Market in downtown Sheffield (see Fig. I). Although its owners claim it to be ‘the only thing of its kind’, it actually has counterparts in a similarly aged sirloin preserved elsewhere in Sheffield and a leg of lamb, now destroyed, in Bourne, Lincolnshire. Considered together, the local legends that have developed around these pieces of meat pose an interesting case study in the apparent polygenesis of similar legends and in their corresponding decline. In particular, the stories of these pieces of meat illustrate how the lives of legends associated with an occupational group — in this case, retail butchers — may be intimately connected with the changing nature of the work and identity of the folk group whose lives and interests the legends represent.