Fischer’s Meat Market was one of those local places you could walk to for all of your groceries, preventing that area of York, PA from being a food desert—a term that wouldn’t surface for years and something we needn’t have worried about in the prosperous 1960s. The market had canned foods, veggies, and of course the long counter with fresh meat that had been butchered, prepped, and sliced on the premises.
I mention in my memoir, Immaculate Misconceptions: Tales of Catholic School, how they would deliver the animals for slaughter, and we’d hear them out the window of our grade school and feel a kinship with them, since our nun was crazy.
My aunt worked there for awhile and became quite knowledgeable about different cuts of meat. She would often order “Boston butt” which is an inherently amusing term. It’s here I would see oxtails for making inexpensive soup, and Fischer’s was the source of beef hearts (which we stuffed—with stuffing like a turkey) and beef tongue—the latter for sandwiches, of course!
MUSOFYR 