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Pig's Head and Feet, in Brawn
Take the head and feet of a fully-grown porker, and cleanse them thoroughly. Prepare them, by splitting open the head, cutting off the ears and snout, removing the brains and eyes, scraping the feet, and, if necessary, singeing the coverings of the toes until they are loose, and can be taken off; then sprinkle salt freely over the head, feet, and ears, and leave them to drain for twenty-four hours. At the end of that time wipe them all dry, put them into a deep pan, and rub into them an ounce and a half of powdered saltpetre, mixed with half a pound of moist sugar; and add, in a few hours, half a pound of common salt. The following day pour a cupful of strong vinegar over them, and turn and baste them every day for a week. Wash them in one or two waters, and put them into a stewpan, with as much lukewarm water as will cover them, and let them simmer until tender, so that the bones can be easily drawn out from both the head and feet. Cut the gristle from the thick part of the ears. Wipe the meat, lay it on a flat board, and season it equally in every part with a mixture made of a tea-spoonful and a half of powdered mace, mixed with a large nutmeg, grated, a salt-spoonful of powdered cloves, and a salt-spoonful of cayenne pepper. Put one cheek, skin downwards, upon a board, lay the feet and ears upon it and on the top the other cheek, and make it as even as possible, by laying the thick part of one cheek upon the thin part of the other. Roll it as tightly as possible, and bind securely with pieces of broad tape. Fasten a cloth over the meat, and sew it up at both ends. Lay it in a stewpan, and put with it the bones and trimmings of the head and feet, two onions, two carrots, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a bay-leaf, two or three sticks of celery, and a tea-spoonful of peppercorns. Simmer all gently together for two hours, then lift the stewpan off the fire, and leave the meat in it undisturbed until the liquid is half cold. Take off the cloth, put the brawn between two dishes, place a weight upon these, and let the brawn lie until it is cold and stiff. Then, and not before, remove the tapes, and serve as required. The brawn should be cut into thin slices, and will be found excellent for breakfast, supper, or luncheon. If liked, the feet can be omitted, and the head only used. Time, two hours and a half to three hours to boil plainly; two hours to boil after being rolled. Sufficient for a breakfast or supper dish.
This is a nitrate cure carried out at room temperature with no thermometer and no weight ratio, and the quantity of saltpetre is far outside anything permitted or advisable today. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a revised method; anyone wanting head brawn should work from a current, tested curing recipe.
- The saltpetre dose is the fatal flawAn ounce and a half of powdered saltpetre is about 42 g of potassium nitrate. A pig's head and four feet might weigh somewhere in the region of 4-8 kg, which puts the nominal cure in the thousands of ppm nitrate on the meat. Modern ingoing limits are far lower, from roughly 150 ppm under EU rules to a permitted maximum of some 1,700 ppm for dry cures elsewhere, and potassium nitrate is toxic at gram-scale doses.
- Nothing regulates how much cure enters the meatThe salt, sugar and saltpetre are rubbed on and the meat basted in its own brine for a week, so uptake depends entirely on surface area, temperature and how diligently it is turned. There is no way to know what any given slice contains. Equilibrium curing by percentage of meat weight exists precisely because rub-and-turn methods cannot be dosed.
- A week at unstated temperature"Turn and baste them every day for a week" assumes a cold larder, considerably cooler than a modern kitchen. At 20C, a head in a shallow salt cure is a week-long incubation of the surface flora, and a split head with brain and eye cavities offers a great deal of surface.
- Head meat is high-risk raw materialSnout, ear and jowl carry heavy surface contamination from the slaughter floor and are among the harder cuts to clean properly. The long simmer does eventually deal with pathogens, but only after the meat has spent a week being handled, wiped, rolled and bound at ambient temperature.
- The rolled shape slows heatingAnd the cooling is slower still -- The meat is simmered until tender, then boned, seasoned, rolled tight, taped and sewn into a cloth by hand before a second two-hour simmer, so it is extensively handled between cooks. The recipe then leaves the parcel sitting in cooling liquor until half cold, straight through the range where surviving spore-formers multiply, before it is pressed and chilled.
- What some of the vocabulary meansA porker is a young pig raised for fresh meat rather than bacon; moist sugar is unrefined light brown sugar; a salt-spoonful is about a quarter of a teaspoon. "Tape" is plain cotton butcher's tape, not adhesive.
- If you want the dishHead brawn made without any nitrate at all, from a scalded and thoroughly cleaned head, chilled promptly and eaten within a few days, is a perfectly ordinary modern preparation. Use a recipe written with weights, temperatures and refrigeration in mind.
Brawn came into English from Old French braon, a fleshy part or muscle, and in Middle English was used especially of boar's flesh; by the medieval period it had come to mean the pressed, jellied preparation of boiled head meat set in its own gelatine, sliced cold. The same thing is head cheese in America, fromage de tête in France and Sülze in Germany. A head yields a great deal of collagen and very little that can be roasted or fried, and it had to be used quickly after the autumn kill. The recipe assumes a cold larder, a stewpan large enough for a head, and a cook willing to spend nine or ten days on a breakfast dish. The saltpetre is there for colour as much as preservation: without it the pressed meat sets a dull grey-brown. Commercial brawn survived well into the twentieth century on British delicatessen counters, and has lately attracted renewed interest from butchers working whole carcasses.