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Pig's Head Galantine
Take the head of a large butcher's porker cut off with a good part of the neck attached. Sings off any remaining hairs and trim it clean. Commence at the throat and bone it carefully, then put it in pickle for 3 or 4 days. Stuff it with sausage meat (or, any forcemeat used for boned turkeys will do) and strips of red tongue and fat bacon, and season with aromatic spiced salt. Form it in its natural shape, sew the cuts with cotton twine, roll up tightly in a cloth and boil 5 or 6 hours in stock seasoned well with soup vegetables, salt, pepper and sage, and, if so required, with a bottle of white wine. But with the wine stock use thyme instead of sage. When done let it cool in the liquor till it can be handled with ease, then take off the cloth and bind the head again with bands of cloth, drawing it into the shape it is to have when cold.
Set the ears up, and if curled by boiling flatten them with split pieces of wood. When quite cold unwind the bandage, draw out the sewing twine, trim the head and glaze it in the ways directed for roast hams. "'I had hoped,' said Glaucus, in a melancholy tone, 'to have procured you some oysters from Britain; but the winds that were so cruel to Caesar have forbid us the oysters. * * * They want the richness of the Brundusium oyster, but at Rome no supper is complete without them.'" --Last Days of Pompeii. "And glittering blocks of colored ice." "Ices and gentle drinks such as the fancy of America could alone devise." --Lothair.
In the entire list of foreign royal minus, some four score in number, previously ins ancestor these columns, only one has huitres auz citrons, or raw oysters at all, and this is at the ducal palace of Hesse Darmstadt, in 1868, and the oysters preceded the meal.
However, the fashion cannot be very new, for they tell us the emperor Heliogabalus used to eat 400 Brundusium Blue Points every morning, to give himself an appetite for his breakfast.
According to a writer in Leslie's Monthly, speaking for New York, the rule which declares oysters good only in the months spelled with "r" is but little regarded now, and the trade is becoming curiously systematized so that there is a different crop of oysters for different seasons and different purposes. The Prince's Bay's ru'e almost exclusively in the summer months, succeeded by Sounds and Mill Ponds. The winter months bring the Rockaways and East Rivers, and the Blue Points, most esteemed, predominate through the spring. There are long Saddle Rocks for roasts and broils; East Rivers and Virginias for stews, while for a raw dish the round, fat, large Blue Points and Shrewsburys are preferred.
The effort at luxury now is to serve raw oysters in hollowed blocks of ice, and they might as well be in clear colored ices, sea green and ocean blue, frozen in form with shells and pebbles-much easier to freeze than sweet ices and mousses glacees. "`What will your worship please to take for sup-supper?' inquired the host. 'I have a cold capon, and a cold ham, and a famous cold pasty; and I can fry you some noble crimson trout from the Darent, or silver eels, as you may like best, and I can add a dish of rare crayfish from the Cray.' `Give me the trout and the capon,' replied Chaucer. 'And, hark ye, while you are preparing supper, bring me a flask of red Gascoigne wine and a manchet.'" --James' Merry England.
A cold buffet showpiece from the garde manger side of the trade, and one of the more demanding items in the book. The bulk of the work is boning and shaping; the cooking is slow and unattended.
- Sourcing the headA "butcher's porker" is a pig raised and sold for pork at market weight, so the head is a large one. Any butcher who breaks whole pigs can supply one with the neck attached, but it needs ordering; ask for it whole rather than halved, or boning is impossible.
- Singeing and cleaningModern heads arrive scalded and largely clean, but stubble remains in the snout, jowl and around the ears. A kitchen torch does what the old flame-singe did; scrape with a knife and wash well afterwards.
- The pickleThe book assumes you know its standard brine. Any wet cure of about 1 cup salt and 1/2 cup sugar per gallon of water will do the job in 3 to 4 days, and the head must be fully submerged and held in the refrigerator at or below 40F for the whole time, not in a cool cellar. Saltpetre is optional here and unnecessary, since the galantine is cooked through and eaten within days.
- Aromatic spiced saltPeriod recipes for spiced salt combine salt and pepper with dried thyme and bay plus small amounts of clove, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon, though proportions vary from book to book. Season the stuffing as you would any forcemeat, on the order of a teaspoon or two per pound, and use less where the sausage meat is already salted.
- "Boil" means a bare simmerA rolling boil bursts the skin and drives the forcemeat out through the seams. Hold the stock at 180-190F, barely trembling, and rely on an internal temperature of 165-170F rather than the clock. The recipe's 5 to 6 hours is longer than doneness alone requires, but the long, slow cooking is what softens a head; test for tenderness.
- Wine versionThe recipe offers a bottle of white wine in the cooking stock as an option, and where the wine is used it directs thyme in place of sage.
- Cooling and shapingThis is the hinge. The galantine must set in its cloth bandages while the natural gelatin is still liquid, so rewrap and shape it while warm and let it go cold overnight under light, even pressure. Unwrapped hot, it collapses; chilled loose, it will never slice cleanly.
- The glaze"Glaze" here means brushing with reduced, near-solid meat stock (glace de viande) or a clear aspic, applied in thin coats on a thoroughly cold surface. Warm it only to the point of flowing.
- Yield and serviceA whole head with neck feeds twenty to thirty as a cold cut. Slice thin with a long knife, serve at cool room temperature with mustard, pickles or a sharp vinaigrette, and keep it refrigerated and use it within about four days.
- The text that followsEverything after "glaze it in the ways directed for roast hams" belongs to another entry on oysters and cold suppers; it is typesetting spillover in the original page, not part of the method.
A galantine is a boned, stuffed, poached joint set in its own jelly and served cold; the origin of the name is uncertain, one proposal among several deriving it from Old French forms related to galine, a hen, since poultry was the classic subject. Applying the technique to a pig's head sits at the meeting point of two traditions: the elaborate French cold table, where a galantine was a carved, glazed centrepiece, and the older British and American farm practice of head cheese or brawn, in which the same head was simply boiled, picked and pressed into a loaf. This version keeps the peasant raw material and the aristocratic finish, right down to propping the ears upright with split wood so the thing reads as a pig on the buffet.