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Brawn
Prepare a hog's head by cutting off the ears, taking out the brains, and cleaning generally; rub in plenty of salt, and let it drain a whole day and night. Rub in two ounces of saltpetre and the same quantity of salt, and let it stand for three days. Next, put the head and salt into a pan and cover it with water for two days. Now wash it well from the salt, and boil till the bones can be easily removed. Extract these and take off the skin of the head and tongue carefully. Chop up the meat into bits, but do not mince it, and season with pepper, salt, and shallot to taste. Place the skin of one-half of the head into a pan, closely fitting it, and press into it the chopped head and tongue. When this is done, take the other skin and lay it cleverly in place, or put the other skin in the pan and proceed as before, and turn out when cold. Should the head be too fat, add some lean pork. For a sauce, boil a pint of vinegar with a quart of the liquor in which the head was boiled, and two ounces of salt, and pour over the brawn when the liquor is cold. The hair should be carefully removed from the ears, and they must be boiled till tender, then divided into long narrow pieces and mixed with the meat. Time to boil, from two to three hours. Probable cost of a pig's head, 5d. per pound.
This is a curing recipe as much as a cooking one, and the cure is the problem. The quantities and the room-temperature standing times belong to a period before nitrate dosing was understood or regulated.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeTwo ounces of potassium nitrate is roughly 57 g, rubbed into a single head with no stated weight of meat to dose against. Modern curing salts are formulated to deliver on the order of 100-200 parts per million of nitrite or nitrate in the finished product; a blind ounce-scale addition of pure saltpetre can exceed that by an order of magnitude. Excess nitrate and nitrite are toxic, not merely unpalatable.
- Days of standing at unspecified temperatureThe head is salted for a day and a night, held three days after the saltpetre, then covered with water for two more days, with no mention of refrigeration or a cold larder. That is five to six days of raw pork head at whatever temperature the kitchen happens to be, which is exactly the window in which spoilage and pathogen growth occur.
- No temperature anywhere in the process"Boil till the bones can be easily removed" and "time to boil, from two to three hours" is the whole of the thermal control. A pressed, gelatine-set meat loaf held under a vinegar liquor has no verifiable internal temperature at any stage, and the cooling and pressing period is unmanaged.
- The vinegar liquor is a garnish, not a preservativeA pint of vinegar diluted with a quart of stock and 2 oz of salt, poured on cold, produces a pH and salt concentration that will not reliably preserve anything. It reads as a keeping medium but does not function as one.
- The offal is not fit for this treatment nowThe brains are taken out at the start, and the recipe also assumes a fresh-killed, untrimmed head with ears and tongue attached, cleaned at home. A whole head is now a butcher's order rather than a supermarket item, and home cleaning of one adds another uncontrolled handling stage.
- If you want brawnUse a current head-cheese or brawn recipe with weighed cure, a stated cure percentage, refrigerated curing at a specified temperature, and a target internal temperature for the cooking stage.
- Reading the cost note'5d. per pound' is five old pence in pre-decimal money, a low price for meat at the time. Heads and other offal were among the cheaper things on the butcher's slab, which is much of the reason this dish exists.
Brawn is one of the oldest surviving British uses of the pig's head: the meat is cooked off the bone, chopped rather than minced, seasoned, and pressed so that the natural gelatine in the skin and bone sets it into a sliceable loaf. The word once meant boar's flesh generally, and brawn served at Christmas with mustard is recorded in English households from the medieval period onward; the French fromage de tête and German Sülze are the same idea. Nothing on the animal was wasted, and the skin that would now be discarded is here the mould and the setting agent at once. The saltpetre is there for colour as much as keeping, since nitrate is what holds cured pork pink instead of letting it go grey; saltpetre was sold by the ounce from the chemist, and recipes of this kind give no guidance on dose.