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Jowl and Turnip Salad
This is an old Virginia dish, and much used in the spring of the year. The jowl, which must have been well smoked, must be washed clean, and boiled for three hours. Put in the salad, and boil half an hour; if you boil too long, it will turn yellow. It is also good broiled for breakfast with pepper and butter over it.
The jaw-bone should be removed before sending to the table; this is easily done by running a knife around the lip and under the tongue. The jowl and salad should always be served with fresh poached eggs.--Mrs. P. W.
A spring greens dish built on cured pork, written for a cook who already knew what a jowl looked like and what "salad" meant on a Virginia table. Two words need translating before anything else.
- "Salad" means turnip greensIn nineteenth-century Southern usage salad (often written "sallet") is a mess of cooked greens, here the tops of spring turnips. Figure 2 to 3 lb of untrimmed greens, stemmed and washed in several changes of water, for a jowl of 2 to 3 lb.
- The jowl itselfSmoked hog jowl is the cured cheek, sold whole or in slabs at Southern markets and Latin and Asian groceries; ask for it by name or look for "jowl bacon." A slab of streaky smoked bacon or a smoked ham hock will stand in, though the hock gives more gelatin and less fat.
- Wash means desalt"Washed clean" understates it. Old dry-cures ran far saltier than anything sold today, but a modern jowl is still assertive; scrub off surface cure and, if the piece tastes very salty at the cut edge, soak it an hour or two in cold water before it goes in the pot.
- Three hours is not an errorA cured, bone-in jowl wants long, gentle simmering to soften the rind and render the fat. Keep it at a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil; if the water gets low, top it up with boiling water.
- The yellow greens warningThis is the hinge of the recipe. Turnip tops hold their green for roughly 25 to 35 minutes of simmering and then go olive-drab and sulfurous. Add them to the pork liquor, cook until tender, and take them up; leave the lid ajar so the sulfur compounds escape.
- Keep the pot liquorThe recipe says nothing about the cooking liquid, but it is seasoned by the smoke and fat and worth keeping; broth of this kind was commonly spooned over greens or sopped with cornbread. Do not drain it away.
- Removing the jaw-boneThe instruction to run a knife around the lip and under the tongue works because the meat has cooked loose. Do it on a board, not at the table, and let the piece rest a few minutes first so it holds together for slicing.
- Serving and yieldA 2 to 3 lb jowl with this quantity of greens should feed four to six. The recipe treats the poached eggs as essential rather than optional ("should always be served with fresh poached eggs"), so allow one per person and poach them while the meat rests.
- The breakfast variationFor the broiled version, cut the cooked or raw jowl into slices about a quarter inch thick and broil until the edges crisp, then finish with black pepper and butter. Raw slices will smoke heavily under a broiler; a heavy skillet is easier to manage.
Turnips earned their place in Virginia kitchens twice over: the roots kept through winter in a cellar or straw-covered pit, and the tops were among the first fresh greens of the year, which is why this dish is described as "much used in the spring." Pairing them with a well-smoked jowl reflects the ordinary economy of hog-killing time in late autumn -- the hams and middlings were the prized cuts, while jowls, hocks and feet went into the smokehouse to be drawn on later for seasoning meat. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathered contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, and this one carries only "Mrs. P. W." The greens-with-pork-and-egg combination remained standard well into the twentieth century across the upper South; the recipe takes care to caution against boiling the greens yellow.