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WILD BOAR'S HEAD (superlative recipe)
Remove the hair, snout, and bones from a boar's head, and take off the ears. Sprinkle a little salt upon it, and put it into a meat pickle for three or four hours. Meantime, take the white part of the flesh of four young rabbits, and an equal weight of tongue, boiled fat bacon, and peeled truffles. Cut all into one-inch dice, and mix thoroughly. Take the remainder of the rabbit flesh free from skin and gristle, and make forcemeat of it, by chopping it up with four pounds of veal and four pounds of fat bacon, and seasoning all rather highly. Drain the head, wipe it with a soft cloth, sprinkle mixed spices upon it without salt, and cover with layers of forcemeat, intermixed with the truffles, rabbit etc. Form the head into shape, wrap it in a cloth, and put it into a stewpan. Pour over it some good nicely-flavoured stock to which a bottle of Madeira or sherry has been added, and let it stew gently till done enough. Take it up, drain it, remove the cloth, wrap the head in a fresh cloth, and, beginning at the snout, bind it round and round with tape. Leave it until quite cold, remove the tape and the cloth, put it in the oven for a minute, and wipe the grease from the surface. Trim the back part of the head neatly. Fasten the ears in their places with small skewers; they should, meantime, have been boiled separately, but not long enough to cause them to lose their shape. Hide the skewers with lard and mutton suet, and rub the head all over till it is black and shiny with a little lard mixed with some very clean soot. Cut out a piece of the skin in the shape of a shield between the eyes, cover the place with lard, and decorate it with a crest or a monogram, or even a few flowers. Stick the tusks, re-modelled in fat, in their places, and fill the eyes with white of egg and a little piece of beetroot. Surround the head with a wreath of flowers, place it on a dish covered with a napkin, or on a stand, garnish with jelly, and serve. The skin should be removed before the head is carved. Time to boil the head, five hours or more. Probable cost, very uncertain.
This is a Victorian showpiece rather than a dish, and two of its steps put it outside anything a modern kitchen should attempt. The notes below explain where it fails and what the vocabulary means.
- Soot is not a food colouringThe instruction to rub the head "till it is black and shiny" with lard mixed with "very clean soot" is the fatal one. Chimney soot is largely unburnt carbon carrying polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, several of them known carcinogens, and lard extracts them readily. There is no such thing as clean soot, and the fact that the skin is peeled off before carving does not keep the fat and the coating off the meat beneath.
- Wild boar and TrichinellaWild suids are a principal reservoir of Trichinella in Europe and North America, and boar meat has caused documented outbreaks. This recipe judges doneness by "five hours or more" and "till done enough" in a vessel of stock, with no temperature given anywhere, on a mass several inches thick at its centre. That is exactly the situation in which time-based cooking is not a substitute for a measured internal temperature.
- The "meat pickle" is undefinedThe recipe refers to "a meat pickle" as something the reader is presumed already to know, without giving its salt concentration, any nitrate content, or its age, so the three or four hours specified cannot be reproduced or assessed. At that length it is a brief flavouring brine rather than a cure, but if you intend to cure anything, work from weighed salt, weighed curing salt and a controlled temperature.
- A raw stuffing inside a raw jointFour pounds of veal, four pounds of fat bacon and the rabbit trimmings are chopped into a highly seasoned forcemeat and packed in layers around the head, then cooked as one solid mass. Ground raw meat at the cold core of a large boned joint is the hardest thing in a kitchen to bring to temperature, and this recipe offers no check on it at all.
- White of egg in the eye socketsThe eyes are filled with raw egg white and beetroot after the head has cooled, and the head then sits out under a wreath of flowers for service. Raw egg applied to cooked meat as decoration adds a Salmonella route with nothing downstream to control it.
- If you want the effectFollow a current recipe for a brined, boned and stuffed pork shoulder or a modern brawn, from a source that gives weighed cure quantities and an internal temperature. Do not adapt this one.
The boar's head was the most theatrical dish in the English ceremonial repertoire, carried in at Christmas with a lemon or an apple in its jaws and, at Queen's College, Oxford, still accompanied by a version of the Boar's Head Carol, a text of which was printed in Wynkyn de Worde's songbook of 1521. By the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the 1870s, the wild boar had been extinct in Britain for centuries and the heads were imported or made up from farmed pork; the elaborate finishing here, with lard tusks, skewered-on ears and a lard-and-soot blacking to imitate wild bristle, belongs to that tradition of confected medievalism. The recipe is also a fair specimen of high Victorian garde-manger practice, in which a cold buffet centrepiece was built like a piece of joinery, bound in tape from the snout backwards to set its shape, and decorated with a shield cut in the skin bearing a crest or monogram. Cassell's own "probable cost, very uncertain" is the honest verdict: this was a dish for a household with a professional cook, a large stewpan and a bottle of Madeira to spare.