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Pig's Head Pudding
Boil head and liver until perfectly done, cut up as for hash. Put it on again in warm water and season highly with butter, pepper, salt, and a little chopped onion.
After well seasoned, put in a baking-dish with one egg beaten light. Bake two hours, and lay over hard-boiled eggs sliced, and strips of pastry across the top. Calf's Head Pudding can be made in the same way.--Mrs. Col. S.
A hog-killing dish built on the principle that nothing from the head is wasted. The original assumes a whole fresh pig's head and a cook who already knows what a hash looks like; almost everything else has to be supplied.
- Sourcing the headA whole fresh pig's head is a special order from a butcher and can weigh anywhere from about 10 to 20 lb depending on the animal; a half head is easier to handle, and cheeks and jowl alone will do if you accept a smaller and leaner yield. The liver here is pork liver, one lobe of which is plenty for a half head.
- "Boil until perfectly done"That means simmered, not boiled hard, until the meat pulls from the bone with no resistance -- roughly 3 hours for a half head. Liver needs far less; add it for the last 30 minutes or it will turn grainy and bitter.
- Pick over the meatOnce cool enough to handle, strip the meat and discard bone, gristle, the eyes and the ear cartilage. The tongue, skinned, is good in the mixture. "Cut up as for hash" means a coarse hand-chop, not a mince.
- The second cooking in "warm water"Use the strained cooking liquor rather than plain water -- it is rich in gelatin and is what holds the pudding together. Add just enough to keep the chopped meat loose and moist, on the order of a cup to two cups; a dry mixture bakes into a brick.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits a covered dish of already-cooked meat. Cover for most of the baking so the surface does not dry out.
- The two hoursEverything in the dish is cooked before it goes in the oven, so two hours is about setting and melding, not about doneness. An hour to ninety minutes at 350F is enough for a dish of ordinary depth; judge it by the mixture being firm and set rather than by the clock.
- Pastry and eggs at the endRead the last sentence as a finish, not a beginning. Uncover the dish, lay the sliced hard-boiled eggs over, arrange strips of short pastry in a lattice, and return it for 20-25 minutes until the pastry is browned. Pastry set on top at the start of two hours will be leather.
- Seasoning"Season highly" is meant seriously -- boiled head meat is bland and fatty and wants far more salt and black pepper than seems reasonable. Sage, mace or a spoon of vinegar are period-appropriate additions if it still tastes flat.
- YieldA half head plus liver gives roughly 3 lb of picked meat and fills a 9x13 dish -- 8 to 10 servings. It is rich; a sharp pickle or slaw alongside is not optional.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of recipes signed with an initial and a title -- "Mrs. Col. S." would have been known to her neighbors and is opaque to everyone since. This one belongs to the late-autumn hog-killing, when a farm butchered its pigs in cold weather and had to deal with the whole animal in a few days: hams and shoulders to the smokehouse, fat to the lard kettle, and the head, feet and organs dealt with first because they kept least well. The same boiled-head meat becomes souse or head cheese when packed cold in its own jelly; baked hot with egg and a pastry lattice, it becomes a pudding in the older English sense of a savory baked dish, a line generally traced back to the brawn of medieval and Tudor kitchens. The offhand closing note that calf's head will do the same way is a reminder that a head, of whatever animal, was simply an ingredient in this period rather than an oddity.