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To Hash Pig's Head
Take head, feet, and haslet of pig; boil them until done, then cut them up fine, taking out the bones.
Add black pepper, salt, a little sage. 2 onions chopped fine. A little red pepp 1 teaspoonful mace. 1 teaspoonful cloves.
Put it back in the same vessel with liquor and cook till done, then thicken with a little flour. Add two hard-boiled eggs and one cup walnut catsup.--Mrs. Dr. J.
A whole-hog offal hash of the sort made at hog-killing time, when the head and pluck had to be used within a day or two. The instructions assume you already know what to do with a scalded head; the notes below fill in what the original leaves out.
- HasletThe haslet (or harslet) is the pluck: heart, liver, lungs and often the spleen. Lungs cannot be sold for food in the United States, so a modern version uses heart and liver, with a little kidney if you like. Order the head split from a butcher; it will need a day's notice.
- Prep the head firstThe head must be scraped clean, the ears and snout scrubbed, the eyes and brain removed, and the whole thing soaked in cold salted water for several hours to draw blood. None of this is mentioned and all of it matters to the finished flavour.
- "Boil them until done"A split head needs 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, until the meat slips from the bone. The liver and heart need far less; add the heart for the last hour and the liver in the final 30 minutes, or it turns grainy and bitter. Keep the pot below a rolling boil so the liquor stays clear enough to use.
- "Cook till done" the second timeEverything is already cooked at this stage. The second cooking is only to marry the seasoning and reduce the liquor, 20 to 30 minutes. Add just enough of the strained cooking liquor to keep the hash loose, then thicken with a slurry of flour and cold liquid rather than dry flour.
- Mace and clovesA teaspoon each of ground mace and ground cloves is assertive by current standards, and cloves in particular will dominate. Half those amounts, taste, and build up. Ground spice kept in an unsealed tin would have lost strength quickly, which may go some way to explaining why quantities in these books run high.
- Walnut catsupNot a tomato product. Walnut catsup is a dark, thin, salty condiment made from green walnuts, anchovy, vinegar and spice, closer to Worcestershire than to ketchup. A cup is a lot of salt and liquid at once; if substituting, use about a third of a cup of Worcestershire sauce and hold back on the added salt until the end.
- Red pepper"A little red pepp" means cayenne, not a fresh sweet pepper. A quarter teaspoon is a little.
- The eggsChop the hard-boiled eggs and fold them in off the heat at the very end. Cooked into a simmering hash they break down and disappear.
- Yield and servingA single hog's head with the pluck makes a large quantity, enough for ten or more. Serve hot with cornbread, or press the hot mixture into a loaf pan, chill overnight and slice it cold.
This is the sort of hog-killing recipe found in Southern household cookbooks of the later nineteenth century; Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is one such collection. The hog was the central meat animal of the Southern household and the killing was done all at once in cold weather. The head, feet and pluck spoiled fastest and so were dealt with first, which is why many regional cookbooks of the period carry some version of this dish alongside souse, head cheese and scrapple. What separates this one from plain souse is the seasoning: mace, cloves and above all walnut catsup, an English condiment of green walnuts, salt and spice used in American kitchens through the nineteenth century and increasingly scarce thereafter, displaced by bottled Worcestershire and tomato ketchup. The attribution "Mrs. Dr. J." is typical of such books, which often credit contributors by initial and by their husbands' titles.