Home › The Principles of Cookery › Boar's Head, Boiled
Boar's Head, Boiled
Remove the snout, hair, and bones, from a boar's head; cleanse it thoroughly, scald and put it into a pot containing boiling vinegar and water; add two ounces of salt, a few peppercorns, some parsley, thyme, shallot, and sage; let it steep for three days, with the tongue and two pounds of the meat. When drained, fill up the cavities made by the removal of bones, etc., with thin slices of the meat and tongue rolled together; fasten up the opening with strong thread as soon as the head has been well filled and the form is good. Put it, tied up in a cloth, into a stewpan with the herbs, etc., and add a pint of wine, four cloves, a carrot, and an ounce of salt; to simmer from six to seven hours, when it may be taken out and allowed to cool. When quite cold, remove the cloth, undo the fastenings, ornament and glaze the head. Replace the tusks, and insert eyes made of white of egg and beetroot. Serve with a folded napkin under.
This is a Victorian showpiece — a whole boned head reassembled, boiled, glazed and set on the sideboard with glass-like beetroot eyes. The cooking method is sound in outline, but the three-day steep at the front of it is where the recipe stops being usable, and no amount of adjustment to the later stages fixes it.
- The three-day steep is the failureThe head, tongue and two pounds of loose meat are scalded and put into boiling vinegar and water with two ounces of salt, then left to steep for three days. The pot is boiling only at the start; no holding temperature is given for the three days that follow. The volume of liquid is never given either, so neither the salt concentration nor the final acidity can be known, and a large mass of barely-cooked pork sitting for 72 hours in a bath that may well be too weak to control anything is the problem. Bacterial toxins produced during that window are not undone by the later simmering.
- Wild boar carries parasites domestic pork largely does notTrichinella and Toxoplasma remain genuine risks in wild suids in a way they are not in inspected commercial pork. A six- to seven-hour simmer would deal with them; three unrefrigerated days beforehand is the part that cannot be salvaged.
- Curing without measurementThere is no cure salt, no weight for the head itself against which to calculate the salt, no brine strength and no holding temperature — and the salt that is given (two ounces, then another ounce) is stated in isolation from any volume of liquid. Treat this page as a description of what a Victorian kitchen did, not as a procedure to follow. If you want a boar's head or a brawn, work from a current recipe with measured cure and stated temperatures.
- What the terms meanA stewpan here is a lidded pan used on the stovetop, not an oven dish; the head is bound in a cloth to hold its shape while it cooks, the same technique used for galantines and brawn. "Glaze" in this period usually means reduced, clarified meat stock brushed over the cold surface, though aspic was also used; the recipe does not say which.
- The scale nobody accounts forA boar's head is a two-hand object; boned and stuffed it needs a pan and a burner most domestic kitchens do not have, and the recipe assumes a cook who can keep six or seven hours of gentle simmer under control.
- The eyesWhites of egg and beetroot cut for eyes, with the tusks pushed back into the sockets, tell you the dish was judged first on how it looked from across the room. That part is ornament, not food, and it is the only bit of the recipe that has entirely lost its audience.
A boiled and glazed boar's head is the centrepiece end of a much larger English tradition of head cookery: the same boning, stuffing, binding and long simmer produced everyday brawn (head cheese), which used a domestic pig's head and was pressed into a mould rather than reassembled into a portrait. The whole-head presentation is bound up with Christmas — the Boar's Head Carol survives in a printed collection of 1521, and the annual boar's head procession at Queen's College, Oxford is the best-known survival of the custom — though by the time Cassell's was compiled, wild boar had long been extinct in Britain and any "boar's head" on an English table was almost certainly a large pig's. Its appearance in a late-Victorian household dictionary belongs to the era's appetite for cold, moulded, glazed display food: galantines, aspics, chaud-froids and raised pies, all made ahead, all served cold under a folded napkin, all designed to be admired before being carved.