Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Stew Pig's Head and Jowl
Clean the head and feet; take out the bone above the nose; cut off the ears, clean them nicely. Separate the jowl from the head; take care of the brains to add to the stew. Put the head, jowl, feet and part of the liver in water sufficient to keep well covered; boil until quite done. Split the feet to put on the dish; hash the head and liver; but do not spoil the jowl, which must be put in the middle of the dish and surrounded with the feet and hash. Put all of the hash, jowl and feet in the pot and season with a cup of cream, a lump of butter, pepper and salt, a tablespoonful walnut catsup, an onion chopped fine, a stalk of celery.
A teaspoonful mustard improves it.
Stew half an hour; thicken the gravy with grated bread.--Mrs. P. W.
A whole-head dish written for a household that had just killed a pig and needed to use everything within a day or two. The method is sound; most of the work now is sourcing and knowing when the meat is actually done.
- Sourcing the headA whole pig's head, split or not, plus trotters, is a special order from a butcher rather than a case item. Half a head with one jowl attached is the practical modern quantity and will feed four to six.
- What the jowl isThe jowl is the fatty cheek and throat, the same cut that becomes guanciale. It is the prize here, which is why the recipe insists it go to the table whole rather than be hashed with the rest.
- "Boil until quite done"Expect two and a half to three hours at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which shreds the cheek meat and clouds the broth. The head is done when the meat pulls from the jawbone with no resistance and the trotter skin is translucent.
- The brainsPig brains are still eaten in parts of the American Midwest and in Europe. The recipe says only to keep them 'to add to the stew' and does not say when; treat them as an enrichment rather than a main element, soaking them, pulling away the membranes and poaching them briefly, since long boiling turns them to grit. Anyone uneasy about offal can leave them out with no loss to the structure of the dish.
- Walnut catsupA dark, salty, spiced condiment of green walnuts, once as common as any bottled sauce and still occasionally made by small British producers. Mushroom ketchup is the closest substitute; a tablespoon of Worcestershire will stand in as a rough equivalent.
- Vague measures"A lump of butter" means roughly two tablespoons, and "part of the liver" perhaps a quarter of a pig's liver. Liver overwhelms quickly, so err low.
- Thickening with grated breadStale bread grated to crumbs, stirred in and simmered a few minutes, gives a soft body quite unlike a flour roux. Add it a spoonful at a time; the gelatin already released from the feet and skin does most of the work and it is easy to end up with paste.
- ServingAssemble as directed on a warm platter: the jowl centred, split feet around it, hash filling the gaps, gravy poured over. Chilled, the gelatin from the feet and skin will set the mixture firm, though the cream, butter and breadcrumbs make it a different thing from a true head cheese.
Recipes like this belong to hog-killing season, the cold weeks between late November and January when Southern households slaughtered and had to convert an entire animal into food before it spoiled. The hams and shoulders were salted and smoked for the year ahead, the fat was rendered, and the perishable extremities -- the head, feet, jowl, liver and brains -- were eaten immediately, which is why so many nineteenth-century cookbooks carry a cluster of head-and-trotter dishes. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, preserves that seasonal logic: the recipe assumes the cook has the whole head in front of her and is deciding how to make it presentable. The dressing of the platter, jowl centred and ringed with split feet, suggests this was not treated as a makeshift dish, and the walnut catsup and mustard belong to the English condiment tradition that Virginia cooking retained.