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Pork Brawn
Take a small pig's head with the tongue, and two pig's feet. Clean and wash them, sprinkle two table-spoonfuls of salt over them, and let them drain until the following day. Dry them with a soft cloth, and rub into them a powder made of six ounces of common salt, six ounces of moist sugar, three-quarters of an ounce of saltpetre, and three-quarters of an ounce of black pepper. Dry the powder well, and rub it into every part of the head, tongue, ears, and feet: turn them over and rub them again every day for ten days. Wash the pickle from them, cut off the ears, and boil them with the feet in a separate saucepan with as much cold water as will cover them. They will require to be boiled one hour and a half before the head, and afterwards may be put with it. Put the head and tongue into a stewpan, cover with cold water, and let them boil gently until the bones will leave the meat. Take them up, drain them, cut the meat into small pieces, first removing the bones from the head, feet, and ears, and the skin from the tongue; do this as quickly as possible. Season the mince with a tea-spoonful of white pepper, three salt-spoonfuls of powdered mace, one salt-spoonful of grated nutmeg, and one salt-spoonful of cayenne. Stir all well together, press the meat while still warm into a brawn tin, and lay a heavy weight on the lid. Put it in a cool place until the following day, dip the mould in boiling water, turn the brawn out, and serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Vinegar and mustard should be served with pork brawn. Time to boil the head, two hours, less or more, according to size; till the flesh leaves the bone. Probable cost of head, 5d. to 6 1/2d. per pound. Sufficient for a good-sized breakfast or luncheon dish.
The cooking here is sound old butchery, but the cure is not. The saltpetre quantity sits far outside anything a modern kitchen should attempt, and the recipe never tells you how much meat you are curing.
- The saltpetre is the problemThree-quarters of an ounce is roughly 21 g of potassium nitrate rubbed onto a single head and two feet. Modern permitted levels of added nitrate in cured meat vary between jurisdictions but are far lower than this, putting the allowance for this quantity of pork in the low single figures of grams. The recipe is several times over, with no way for the cook to know the true dose absorbed.
- No weight, no controlA "small pig's head" can weigh several kilograms, and the cure is applied by rubbing rather than by weight of meat. Nitrate curing only works safely when the salt, the nitrate and the meat are all weighed and the ratio is fixed. Here the weight of the meat is not given, so the ratio cannot be known.
- Ten days at "cool"Ten days of dry cure -- A dry cure held for ten days depends entirely on temperature, and the recipe gives no figure for the curing stage at all (the "cool place" it names is for the pressed brawn afterwards). A Victorian larder in winter is not a refrigerator; the same procedure in a warm kitchen is a spoilage risk rather than a preservation method.
- Washing the pickle off does not fix itRinsing removes surface salt but not what has already migrated into the meat over ten days, and the subsequent long boil does nothing to reduce nitrate. If you want brawn, use a current recipe with weighed curing salt, or make it uncured — plenty of modern head cheese recipes do.
- Reading the rest of the page"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. A salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon. The costs are in old pence — 5d. to 6½d. a pound for a pig's head marks it as one of the cheapest meats on the butcher's slab.
- The brawn tinA brawn tin is a deep, lidded mould designed to take a weight on top. The pressing while the meat is still warm is what makes the gelatin from the trotters and skin set the whole into a sliceable block; that part of the technique is entirely sound and is why trotters appear at all.
Brawn is one of the oldest surviving English uses of the pig's head, and the word — from Old French braon, a fleshy part or muscle — came in English to denote boar's flesh rather than the set, potted dish it now describes; by the sixteenth century "brawn" and Christmas were closely linked, and it kept a place on the cold table long after boar had vanished from English woods. What Cassell's describes is essentially head cheese: the collagen in the head, ears and feet dissolves during the long gentle boil and re-sets on cooling, so no added gelatine is needed. Its appearance in a general dictionary of cookery, priced at a few pence a pound and offered as a breakfast or luncheon dish, says a good deal about late-Victorian domestic economy — the head was the cheap end of the pig, and a household that bought one whole was expected to know how to turn it into something that could be sliced and handed round with vinegar and mustard.