Home › The Principles of Cookery › PIG'S HEAD, COLLARED (superlative)
PIG'S HEAD, COLLARED (superlative)
Take a pig's head cut with as much of the neck as can be had. Clean it carefully, split it open to take out the brains, and bone it without injuring the outer skin. Rub it well with common salt, and let it drain for twenty-four hours, then put it into a deep pan, and pour over it a cold brine, prepared as follows. Put one pound of salt and a quarter of an ounce of saltpetre into a stewpan, with four quarts of water, a handful of chopped juniper-berries, half a dozen bruised cloves, three bay-leaves, a sprig of thyme and basil, and two or three sage-leaves. Boil quickly for a quarter of an hour, then put aside to cool. Let the head lie in this brine for nine or ten days, and turn and baste it frequently. Take it up, drain and dry it, and lay it open, skin downwards, upon a table; spread evenly over it a forcemeat, made of half a pound of uncooked ham, half a pound of breast of bacon, four ounces of fresh butter, half a dozen young onions, finely minced, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, with a little cayenne and pounded mace. Pound these ingredients smoothly together. Shape the head as evenly as possible by laying the thick part of one cheek to the thin part of the other, then roll it tightly, bind it securely with tape, cover with a linen cloth, and put it into a stewpan, with as much cold water or stock as will cover it, together with the bones and trimmings of the head and a little seasoning. Let it simmer gently until done enough, that is, until a skewer will pierce it easily. Leave the head in the liquor until it is almost cold, then put it under a weight, and let it lie until the next day. Remove the bindings, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Collared pig's head is a most convenient dish to keep in the house, as it will remain good for a considerable time in moderate weather. Time to boil, four hours, or more, from the time the liquid reaches the boiling point. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for a breakfast or luncheon dish.
This is a wet-cured, rolled and pressed brawn of the kind that once lived on a larder shelf. The curing stage and the keeping claim are the problems, and neither can be patched with a change of oven setting.
- Saltpetre without controlsA quarter of an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in four quarts of brine is an unmeasured nitrate dose by modern standards, with no way to know how much the meat absorbs over ten days. Curing salts today are sold at fixed nitrite/nitrate concentrations precisely so the amount reaching the meat can be calculated.
- Ten days at no stated temperatureThe recipe never says how cold the pan must be kept. A brine of one pound of salt to four quarts of water cannot be relied on to hold a boned pig's head against spoilage organisms at larder or room temperature for nine or ten days, and "turn and baste it frequently" means repeatedly opening and handling it.
- Raw forcemeat sealed inside a rollHalf a pound of uncooked ham and half a pound of uncooked breast of bacon are spread on the inside face and then rolled tight. The recipe does give four hours' simmering or more, but the doneness guidance is "until a skewer will pierce it easily," which is a texture test rather than a measured internal temperature, and the centre of a bound roll of that thickness is the last part to heat through.
- The keeping claim"It will remain good for a considerable time in moderate weather" reflects a household with a cold stone larder and a different tolerance for risk. Cooked pressed pork held unrefrigerated for days is exactly the setting in which Clostridium botulinum and Listeria concerns arise, and a nitrate cure of unknown strength is not an answer to that.
- Cooling in the liquorThe head is left to sit in its cooking liquid "until it is almost cold," then pressed overnight. That is a slow descent through the temperature range where surviving spores germinate, with no guidance on how fast or how cold.
- If you want the dishBrawn and head cheese are still made, and a current recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated refrigeration temperature and a verified internal cooking temperature should be used instead.
- Reading the originalFor context rather than use: "collared" means rolled and tied, not garnished; and "breast of bacon" is the fatty belly cut.
Collaring is one of the oldest English methods of turning an awkward cut into a sliceable one: the meat is boned, seasoned, rolled into a cylinder, bound with tape, boiled and then pressed under a weight so that the gelatine sets it solid. Pig's head, cheap and gelatinous, was the classic candidate, and the results appear in cookbooks under several names — collared head, brawn, and in America head cheese. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, keeps such recipes because a pressed head genuinely solved a problem: it could be made when a pig was killed, kept in a cool larder, and cut cold for breakfast or luncheon for days afterwards, at a time when few kitchens had any reliable cold storage.