Souse Cheese
Put the meat in cold water, let it stand several days, changing the water every day. Scrape well each time the water is changed. If the weather is warm use a little salt in the water. Scraping the meat often will make it white. Boil the meat in sufficient water to cover it; as soon as it is tender drop it in milk-warm water, and when thoroughly cold, in salt water, The head should be boiled until the bones are about to leave the meat. Put in a few ears scraped very white and boil also. Chop the whole very fine and season to taste with pepper and salt; put the meat in a bowl and place a weight on top. When ready for use slice and serve with vinegar. -Mrs. R. G. Fayton.
This is a hog's-head souse of the old farm kind, written for a household that butchered in cold weather and had a cellar rather than a refrigerator. The vocabulary is worth decoding, but the method as printed holds pork at ambient temperature at three separate stages and should not be followed.
- The multi-day soak is the first problemRaw pork head sitting in water for "several days," with nothing but a daily change of water and "a little salt" if the weather is warm, is an open invitation to spoilage organisms. The purpose was to draw out blood and whiten the meat, which it does; it also gives bacteria days of growth at kitchen temperature.
- "Milk-warm water" is a deliberate slow coolMilk-warm means about blood heat, somewhere near 100F. Dropping just-boiled meat into water at that temperature and letting it come down gradually parks it in the range where surviving bacteria multiply fastest, and the recipe gives no indication of how long that takes.
- Pressing at room temperatureThe chopped meat is packed in a bowl under a weight and left to set with no mention of cold storage. Souse and head cheese are documented vehicles for Listeria monocytogenes, which grows on cooked, handled, ready-to-eat meat, and the finished loaf here is sliced and eaten without further cooking.
- No cure, no measurementsThere is no saltpetre, no measured brine, no weight of salt to meat and no temperature anywhere in the text. Nothing in the process is doing preservative work; the salt water bath is for flavour and firmness only.
- What the ingredients are"The meat" is a hog's head, and the "ears scraped very white" are pig's ears, added for the gelatine and the texture they give when chopped in. Both are still sold by whole-animal butchers, but a current, tested head cheese recipe with refrigeration temperatures should be used instead of this one.
- Why the bones matterBoiling "until the bones are about to leave the meat" is the period's doneness test for collagen breakdown: the head is done when the skull comes apart in the pot. That much gelatine is what lets the chopped meat set into a sliceable loaf under a weight, without any added binder.
Souse takes its name from the old English verb to souse, meaning to steep in pickle or brine, and the vinegar poured over the slices at the table is the last surviving trace of that pickling. Head cheese contains no cheese; the word here means only a pressed loaf shaped in a mould, the same sense preserved in "apple cheese" and "lemon cheese." Recipes like this one belonged to hog-killing season, generally late autumn or early winter, when a farm family slaughtered in cold weather and worked through the animal in a few days, using the head, ears, feet and trimmings that would not keep as roasts or bacon.