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Brawn, Sussex
Prepare a pig's head as directed in the recipe for BRAWN. Strew the halves with salt, and drain them. Take the pig's feet, cleanse them and the ears also. Rub in one ounce and a half of saltpeter with six ounces of sugar, and shortly after six ounces of salt. Next day, pour a quarter of a pint of vinegar over all, and turn the meat in the pickle every twenty-four hours for a week; wash off the pickle and boil till all the bones can be easily removed, but the form of the head must be retained. Flatten the head on a board, cut some of the meat from the thickest part, and place it on the thinnest, to give an even appearance. Season all thoroughly with nutmeg, mace, cayenne, cloves, etc. Intermix the head with pieces of the ears, feet, and tongue; roll it up tightly and bind firmly, tying a thin cloth closely round, and securely fastening it at both ends. Now place the head in a braising or other suitable pan, with the bones and trimmings of the feet and ears, a large bunch of savoury herbs, two onions, a small head of celery, some carrots, a tea-spoonful of black peppercorns, and sufficient cold water to cover all well. Boil for four hours, and allow it to remain in the liquor till nearly cold. Take off the cloth and put the brawn between two dishes, and press with a heavy weight till next day. Before serving take off the bands. Average cost of pig's head, 5d. per pound.
This is a nitrate cure followed by a long boil, and the cure is the problem: the saltpetre is specified at a level far above anything now permitted in food, and the week at the heart of the method has no stated temperature.
- The saltpetre is the reason to stopAn ounce and a half of potassium nitrate — roughly 42 g — rubbed into a single pig's head is an order of magnitude beyond modern curing limits, which are set in fractions of a gram per kilogram of meat. Nineteenth-century recipes routinely call for saltpetre in quantities like this, for colour and keeping; ingested nitrate and nitrite in these quantities are toxic, and the dose here is not adjustable by eye.
- A week of pickling at no stated temperature"Turn the meat in the pickle every twenty-four hours for a week" assumes a cold larder in winter. In a modern kitchen the instruction is meaningless: there is no temperature, no brine strength that can be measured, and no way to tell whether the cure has penetrated the head before spoilage organisms have.
- The vinegar does not make it safeA quarter of a pint of vinegar poured over the surface of a salted head is a flavouring, not an acidification. It will not lower the pH of the interior meat to any preserving level.
- The later boiling does not undo the cureFour hours in the braising pan will handle bacteria, but nitrate is heat-stable. Cooking removes the microbiological question and leaves the chemical one untouched.
- If you want Sussex brawnUse a current recipe with a measured commercial curing salt, or make the dish uncured — brawn is perfectly good as a plain simmered, boned and pressed head. Follow modern quantities rather than scaling these down by guess.
- Reading the originalA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz in imperial measure. A whole pig's head, ears, trotters and tongue is a butcher's order today rather than a shop purchase, and the 5d. per pound reflects a time when the head was among the cheapest cuts in the trade.
Brawn is the pressed, jellied meat of a pig's head, sold in Britain under that name and in America usually as head cheese; the word comes from Old French braon, meaning muscle or fleshy meat, and in medieval English it referred simply to boar's flesh. Several versions of it were recorded because brawn was a standard cold-table and Christmas dish in Victorian households, valued precisely because it turned the cheapest part of the pig into something that sliced cleanly and kept for days. The Sussex method is distinguished by its sweet-and-sour cure alongside the salt and saltpetre, and by the trouble it takes to preserve the shape of the head, boning it while keeping the form and evening out the thick and thin parts before rolling. That attention to appearance marks it as a dish meant to be shown at table, not merely eaten, and the accompanying note of price per pound is typical of a book written for cooks working to a household budget.