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Pig's Head, Collared
Scald and clean a pig's head, and remove the hair, the snout, the eyes, and the brain. Let it soak in cold water for twelve hours, drain it, and sprinkle over it one pound of common salt mixed with a quarter of an ounce of saltpetre, and turn and baste it every day for five days. Wash it, put it into a saucepan half filled with cold water, bring it to the boil, and skim carefully, then simmer gently until the bones can be easily drawn out. Split the head open, season rather highly with black and Jamaica pepper and salt, and roll it evenly by laying the thick part of one cheek to the thin part of the other. Put the head into a cloth, and bind securely, and as lightly as possible, with broad tape. Place it in a stewpan, cover with stock or water, and let it simmer gently until done enough. Lay it between two dishes, place a heavy weight upon it, and let it remain until cold; then turn it out of the cloth, and send to table on a neatly-folded napkin. The feet of the pig may be used as well as the head, or one cheek only with a couple of cow-heels. If it is wished that the pig's head should be collared like brawn, use a larger proportion of saltpetre than is directed above, put in with the cheeks some pieces of lean pork, and cover the whole with a cow-heel. The collared head may, if liked, be kept in a pickle, made of the liquid in which it was boiled, salted and mixed with vinegar. This pickle should be boiled frequently. Time to boil, two hours or more the first time, two hours the second. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for a breakfast, luncheon, or supper dish.
This is a nitrate cure carried out at room temperature over five days, followed by long boiling and storage in a re-boiled brine. The cooking is sound; the curing and keeping are not, and one key quantity is left entirely open. The notes below explain the terms and the specific failures.
- The saltpetre is the problemSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. A quarter-ounce to a pound of salt is not wildly out of line for a surface rub, but the recipe then tells you to "use a larger proportion of saltpetre" for the brawn version without saying how much. Nitrate and nitrite curing today is done to fixed, weighed percentages of the meat because the margin between an effective cure and an unsafe one is narrow, and an open-ended instruction of this kind cannot be followed safely.
- Five days at no stated temperatureThe head is salted and basted daily for five days with no indication of where it should sit. A Victorian larder would generally have been cooler than a modern kitchen, but the recipe fixes nothing. A large, bone-in head held at ambient temperature over five days is exactly the situation a controlled cure is designed to prevent.
- The keeping pickleStoring the finished collar in its own salted, vinegared cooking liquor and boiling that liquor "frequently" was the period substitute for refrigeration. Repeated reboiling kills what has grown but does nothing about toxins already formed, and the salt and acid levels here are unmeasured. If you want a pressed cold cut of this kind, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated holding temperatures.
- Jamaica pepperAllspice, the dried berry of Pimenta dioica, not a pepper at all. Victorian cookbooks use the name interchangeably with pimento.
- Cow-heelA boiled cow's foot, used purely for gelatine: it sets the collar so it slices cleanly. Butchers still sell them, and pig's trotters do the same job. Nothing in the recipe relies on it for flavour.
- Collared, and the tapeTo collar is to bone, season, roll and bind a cut so it presses into a cylinder. Broad tape means woven cotton tape; the recipe asks for it to be bound securely and as lightly as possible. The cloth keeps the shape while the weight does the compressing.
- "Until done enough"The only real test given in the whole recipe is the first one, that the bones draw out easily. The second simmer of about two hours is for the rolled and bound collar, by which point it is being cooked to texture rather than to doneness.
- Cost and yieldThe recipe gives a probable cost of eightpence a pound, and calls the result sufficient for a breakfast, luncheon, or supper dish. A whole head, with the feet added as the recipe allows, gives a substantial collar.
Collared meats belong to a long English tradition of turning awkward, bony, gelatinous cuts into something that slices neatly cold: salmon, eel, breast of veal, beef flank and the pig's head. The technique is close kin to brawn, which Cassell's names directly here, and to what Americans call head cheese: the difference is mainly that brawn is set loose in a mould in its own jelly while a collar is rolled, bound and pressed into a cylinder. The pinkness that saltpetre gives may well have been part of the point, since a boiled head without nitrate turns an unappetising grey, and the sharp keeping pickle can be read as one answer to the question of how a household kept cooked meat edible through a week. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class kitchens, treats the head as a matter of course, and the eightpence-a-pound costing tells you where it sat: a breakfast and supper dish for a household that expected cold meat on the sideboard and did not intend to pay much for it.