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Pig's Cheek, Boiled, and Served with Vegetables
Take half a pig's head, and after removing the brains and tongue, put it into a deep pan. Rub it well with half a pound of common salt, and let it lie for three or four days, turning and basting twice a day. When it is to be cooked, wash it, and put it into a stewpan, with four quarts of cold water; bring it to a boil, skim it well, and put with it a few outer sticks of celery, one or two sliced onions, and a dozen peppercorns. Let it simmer until it is done enough, then drain it from the liquid, serve on a hot dish, and send potatoes and boiled greens to table with it. Some cooks like the vegetables boiled with the cheek, and served round it. The liquid in which it has been boiled may be converted into excellent pea-soup. Time to boil the cheek, two hours and a half. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A plain salt-and-simmer treatment of half a pig's head, of the kind that fed a household for two days and left a pot of stock behind. Nothing here is difficult, but the salting stage needs a modern setting and the pot needs to be watched so it never truly boils.
- Do the salting in the refrigeratorThe original assumes a cold stone larder. Rub the meat with the salt in a non-reactive dish, cover, and keep it at refrigerator temperature for the three or four days, turning and basting it twice a day as the recipe directs, spooning the brine that draws out back over the top. There is no nitrite here, so the cooked meat will be grey-brown rather than the pink of commercial cured cheek.
- "Common salt"Plain non-iodised salt: coarse sea salt or kosher salt. Half a pound to half a head is a light cure by period standards and is meant to season and firm the meat, not to preserve it for months.
- Sourcing the headHalf a pig's head is a butcher order, not a supermarket item, and a butcher can usually split and clean it and remove the eye and ear canal if asked. If a whole half head is more than you want, two or three cured or fresh pork cheeks (the jowl muscle) simmered for about an hour and a half give the same eating.
- Brains and tongueBoth are removed before salting. Brains from cattle are restricted in many countries; pig brains are not, but they spoil very fast and few cooks want them. The tongue is worth keeping, salted alongside and simmered with the head, then skinned while hot.
- Stewpan and waterFour imperial quarts is roughly 4.5 litres. Use a stockpot large enough for the head to sit fully covered; if it is not, top up with boiling water rather than letting a shoulder of meat sit dry above the line.
- Simmer, do not boilThis is the hinge. A rolling boil shreds the cheek meat off the bone and turns the gelatinous parts stringy, and it clouds the liquor you want for soup. Keep it at a bare tremble for the two and a half hours.
- Testing for done"Done enough" means a skewer slides into the cheek with no resistance and the jaw bone pulls clean. Let the meat rest in its liquid off the heat for ten minutes before draining, or it dries as it cools.
- The liquor and the pea soupStrain and chill the cooking liquid, lift the set fat, and taste before using it. A salted head can leave the liquor too salty for soup; dilute with water or unsalted stock and add no further salt until the split peas are soft.
- Yield and servingSix to eight, as the original says, with plain boiled potatoes and greens. Cold, the sliced cheek with mustard is arguably better than hot, and the trimmings pressed into a small basin with a little of the reduced liquor set as an improvised brawn.
Pig's cheek belongs to the older economy of the whole animal, in which the head was too valuable to waste and too awkward to roast, so it was salted and boiled. Cassell's places this among its plain boiled meats and quotes a cost of eightpence a pound. The point is that the head fed a large table, and the liquor became the next day's pea soup, so a single pot produced two meals. The salt-and-simmer method is the domestic cousin of commercial Bath chap, the cured and breadcrumbed pig's jaw sold by grocers and generally associated with the West Country. Brawn, head cheese and the various pressed jellied preparations all begin at the same place, with a split head in salt; what differed was whether the cook served the meat whole and hot or picked it from the bone and let its own gelatine set it firm.