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Pig's Head, Boiled
Take a pig's head which has been salted by the butcher, or if more convenient, pickle it at home. To do this, scald and cleanse it thoroughly. Remove the hair, the snout, the eyes, and the brain. Soak it for twenty-four hours, then cover it with one pound of common salt mixed with an ounce of saltpetre, and turn and baste it every day for five or six days. Drain it, put it into a saucepan, cover with cold water, and put it on the fire, skim the liquid carefully, and simmer the head gently for two hours from the time when the water boils. Send it to table with peas pudding, and boiled greens. The liquor in which the head was boiled may be converted into excellent pea-soup. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
The dish itself — a salted pig's head simmered and served with peas pudding — is straightforward eating, but the home-curing instructions at the front of the recipe are the problem, and they are not a small part of it.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured against the meatAn ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is specified against a pound of salt, but nothing is specified against the weight of the head, which may run anywhere from 8 to 20 lb. Nitrate curing is safe only when the curing salt is calculated as a percentage of the meat's weight; a ratio to the other salt tells you nothing about the dose the meat actually takes up.
- No curing temperature is givenThe head is to be soaked twenty-four hours and then sit under salt for five or six days, turned daily, with no mention of where. A Victorian larder in winter and a modern kitchen in July are different environments entirely, and a dry cure held warm is a botulism and spoilage risk rather than a preservation method.
- Saltpetre is not the same as modern curing saltNitrate must convert to nitrite before it does anything useful, which takes time and the right conditions. Present-day curing uses pre-mixed nitrite salts at controlled concentrations precisely because straight saltpetre gives unpredictable results. Anyone wanting to cure a head should follow a current, tested formulation with weights and temperatures stated.
- "Common salt"This means ordinary salt (sodium chloride), named to distinguish it from the saltpetre it is mixed with. A plain salt without additives, of the sort now sold for pickling, is the nearest modern equivalent. It is not a technical term for anything more specific.
- Peas puddingThe traditional accompaniment: split yellow or green peas soaked, boiled in a cloth or basin until soft, mashed with butter and seasoning. It is served in slices or spoonfuls alongside the meat, not as a sauce.
- The cooking liquorThe suggestion to turn the boiling liquid into pea soup assumes a cure whose saltiness you know. Liquor from a heavily salted head is often too salty to use undiluted, and would need tasting and diluting with fresh water.
- Cost and yieldEightpence per pound puts this at the economical end of the meat counter; head, trotters and offal were the working household's protein. Eight or nine servings is plausible for a whole head, most of the yield being cheek, jowl and the meat around the jaw.
The pig's head sat at the economical end of the Victorian butcher's counter, and Cassell's treats it as a matter of course rather than a curiosity: a household that bought a head got cheek, jowl and enough gelatine to set a brawn, all for pennies a pound. Salting was a common treatment, partly for flavour and partly because a head does not keep. The pairing with peas pudding and boiled greens is the standard English boiled-meat plate of the period, the same combination served with salt beef or a boiled bacon hock, and the instruction to make pea soup from the cooking liquor is characteristic of a book written for cooks expected to waste nothing. Saltpetre had been used to cure meat in Europe for centuries by the time this was printed — it is what gives cured pork its pink colour rather than the grey of plain salt — but the chemistry behind it was not worked out until around the turn of the twentieth century, which is why nineteenth-century recipes give ratios of salt to saltpetre and say nothing about the weight of the meat.