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Pigs' Cheeks, To Dry
INGREDIENTS. Salt, oz. of saltpetre, 2 oz. of bay-salt, 4 oz. of coarse sugar.
Cut out the snout, remove the brains, and split the head, taking off the upper bone to make the jowl a good shape; rub it well with salt; next day take away the brine, and salt it again the following day; cover the head with saltpetre, bay salt and coarse sugar, in the above proportion, adding a little common salt. Let the head be often turned, and when it has been in the pickle for 10 days, smoke it for a week or rather longer.
TIME. To remain in the pickle 10 days; to be smoked, 1 week.
SEASONABLE. - Should be made from September to March. { Note. A pig's cheek or Bath chap, will require two hours' cooking after the water boils.
PIG'S FACE, COLLARED.
Pig's Face, Collared. (A Breakfast or Luncheon Dish.) - INGREDIENTS. - 1 pig's face; salt. For brine, 1 gallon of spring water, 1 lb. of common salt, handful of chopped juniper-berries, 6 bruised cloves, 2 bay-leaves, a few sprigs of thyme, basil, sage, oz. of saltpetre. For forcemeat, 1/2 lb. of ham, 1/2 lb. of bacon, 1 teaspoonful of mixed spices, pepper to taste, 1/4 lb. of lard, 1 tablespoonful of minced parsley, 6 young onions. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Singe the head carefully, bone it without breaking the skin, and rub it well with salt.
Make the brine by boiling the above ingredients for 1/4 hour, and letting it stand to cool. When cold, pour it over the head, and let it steep in this for 10 days, turning and rubbing it often. Then wipe, drain and dry it. For the forcemeat, pound the ham and bacon very finely, and mix with PIG'S FACE. these the remaining ingredients, taking care that the whole is thoroughly incorporated. Spread this equally over the head, roll it tightly in a cloth, and bind it securely with broad tape. Put it into a saucepan with a few meat trimmings, and cover it with stock; let it simmer gently for 4 hours, and be particular that it does not stop boiling the whole time.
When quite tender, take it up, put it between 2 dishes with a heavy weight on the top, and when cold, remove the cloth and tape. It should be sent to table on a napkin, or garnished with a piece of white paper with a ruche at the top.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
Two related preparations from the pork-butchering section: a dry-salted, smoked pig's cheek and a boned, brined, force-meat-stuffed pig's face rolled in a cloth. Both depend on saltpetre in quantities the printed text no longer states legibly, and neither can be reproduced safely as given.
- The saltpetre quantities are missingBoth ingredient lists read "oz. of saltpetre" with the fraction lost from the text as we have it, so the nitrate dose is unknown. Curing salts are safe only at measured concentrations; guessing is how people get either a useless cure or a nitrate overdose.
- Cured but never cookedCured before it is cooked -- The cheek is salted for ten days and smoked for a week; the page's own note says a pig's cheek or Bath chap needs two hours' cooking after the water boils. Nothing in the curing and smoking stage brings the meat to a temperature that kills pathogens, so the cure alone is doing the preservative work through those weeks — which is precisely why the quantities have to be right.
- Smoking temperature is unstatedA week's smoking in a nineteenth-century chimney or smokehouse ran cold, in the range where Clostridium botulinum and staphylococci multiply if the salt and nitrite levels are inadequate. Modern cold-smoking protocols specify salt percentage, humidity and chamber temperature; none of that is here.
- The brine sits at room temperatureThe collared face steeps ten days in a gallon of brine "turning and rubbing it often," with no mention of refrigeration. The recipe was written for a cold larder in the months from October to March, conditions a modern kitchen does not reproduce by default.
- Use a current recipeIf you want a Bath chap or a collared pig's face, work from a modern charcuterie source that gives cure percentages by weight of meat, brine temperature and a finished internal temperature.
- Vocabulary, for readingBay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt. A Bath chap is the cured lower jaw and cheek, sold whole and sliced cold. "Seasonable September to March" reflects cool-weather slaughtering, not flavour. The 2s. 6d. average cost is Mrs Beeton's household budgeting, not a modern guide. The opening words "hang a pig-iron before the middle" are a fragment carried over from a neighbouring recipe and too broken to gloss.
- The ruche of paperThe frilled white paper named at the end is Victorian presentation for the served roll, decorative only and unrelated to the cooking.
Pigs' cheeks and the jowl were the thrifty end of the household pig, and Mrs Beeton's kitchen offers, among its recipes, brawn from the boiled meat, a smoked chap for the breakfast sideboard, and the boned face rolled into a collar for luncheon. The Bath chap is generally said to take its name from the city of Bath, long associated with the trade in cured jowls, and by the mid-nineteenth century the term was used generally in England for a smoked, cone-shaped cured cheek sold ready to boil. Both recipes belong to a period when curing was done in the household rather than bought in, and when the calendar governed the work: pigs were killed in the cold months because salting and smoking in a warm larder failed, an insight later replaced by measured nitrite and refrigeration. "Collaring" — boning meat, spreading it with forcemeat, rolling it tight in a cloth and pressing it under a weight until cold — was applied equally to eel, beef flank and pork, and produced the sliceable cold dishes that filled Victorian breakfast and supper tables.