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Pig's Cheek, Pickled
Split open a pig's head, take out the brains, cut out the snout, and chop off the upper bone, to make the cheeks a good shape. Rub the cheeks with salt, and let them lie for two or three days. Boil a handful of common salt, half a pound of bay salt, half an ounce of saltpetre, four ounces of moist sugar, and a pennyworth of cochineal in a pint of strong ale for a quarter of an hour. Pour the liquid, when cold, over the cheeks, and let them remain in it for a fortnight, turning and basting every day; then hang them in smoke for a week, when they will be ready for use. Probable cost of cheeks, 8d. per pound. Sufficient, one cheek for eight or ten persons.
This is a home cure and cold-smoke for pork, and it belongs to a period before anyone measured nitrate in parts per million or thought about the temperature inside a smokehouse. The instructions cannot be followed safely today, and the notes below explain where they fail rather than how to fix them.
- The saltpetre is unmeasurable in practiceHalf an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) against an unweighed pig's head gives no usable concentration. Nitrate cures work only when the curing salt is weighed against the exact weight of meat; too little leaves the meat unprotected, too much is a genuine toxicity risk. The recipe fixes the liquid at a pint of ale but never gives the weight of the meat.
- The brine is short, weak and dilutedThe brine is short and shallow -- A pint of liquid poured over the cheeks is unlikely to cover them, and the cook is told to turn and baste every day. Meat sitting part-exposed in a sugary, ale-based brine for a fortnight at whatever temperature the larder happened to be is a condition in which spoilage organisms can establish themselves.
- "Hang them in smoke for a week"This is cold smoking: smoke without cooking heat. Nothing in the process ever brings the pork to a temperature that kills pathogens, so safety rests entirely on the cure having been correct. With the cure unquantified, the smoke adds flavour and surface drying and very little else. Clostridium botulinum is the specific hazard in under-nitrited, low-oxygen cured pork.
- Bay salt and common salt are not interchangeable measuresBay salt was coarse sea salt sold in large crystals; 'a handful of common salt' is an unmeasured quantity of finer salt. The two differ in density and dissolving rate, and a handful is not a measure, so even the salt component of this cure cannot be reconstructed as a percentage.
- A pennyworth of cochinealPurely cosmetic, to keep the cured meat pink where the nitrate alone would not. A pennyworth was whatever the grocer handed over for a penny, so there is no quantity here at all. Cochineal is still sold as carmine and is an allergen for a small number of people.
- The brains and the head itselfPigs' heads are still sold by butchers and are excellent for brawn and head cheese, both of which involve long, thorough cooking. Brains are not commonly retailed.
- If you want pickled cheekUse a current cured-meat recipe that specifies a weighed nitrite curing salt as a percentage of meat weight, a fully submerging brine, refrigerated curing, and a controlled smoking temperature.
Pig's cheek, cured and smoked, was among the cheaper cuts of pork in nineteenth-century Britain — the book puts it at eightpence a pound — and smoked cheek is familiar as "Bath chap", the conical cured cheek associated with the West Country. The economy of the thing is the point: the head yielded brawn, the brains a fry, the cheeks a keeping meat, and little was thrown away. Salt, saltpetre, sugar and ale of this kind appear in Victorian bacon cures; the ale supplied sugar and a slightly acid liquid. The cochineal suggests that cured pork was expected to look pink, and that the dye was there to guarantee it.