Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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To Prepare Pig's Cheek for Boiling
473. Cut off the snout, and clean the head; divide it, take out the eyes and the brains; sprinkle the head with salt, and let it drain twenty-four hours. Salt it with common salt and saltpetre; let it lie eight or ten days if it is to be dressed without stewing with peas, but less if to be dressed with peas; and it must be washed first, and then simmered till all is tender.
This is a curing instruction rather than a cooking one, and it is the curing that puts it out of reach: the quantities, the temperature and the duration are all left to the cook's judgement. The notes below explain what the Victorian instructions assume and where they fail against current practice.
- Saltpetre with no quantity"Salt it with common salt and saltpetre" gives no ratio at all. Nitrate and nitrite are effective in a narrow band, measured in parts per million of meat weight, and an eyeballed handful can easily land far above the permitted level. This alone means the recipe cannot be followed as printed.
- A dry cure held at room temperatureThe head is salted and left eight to ten days with no mention of refrigeration or a cellar temperature. A pig's head is thick, bony and slow to take salt, and the interior can sit for days in the range where Clostridium botulinum and ordinary spoilage organisms are active before the cure penetrates.
- The twenty-four hour drainSprinkling with salt and letting the head drain for a full day, before any cure is applied, is the step most at odds with modern handling of raw pork; no temperature or storage condition is given. Nothing in the process brings the meat to a safe temperature until the final simmer, by which point spoilage has already had its opportunity.
- Brains and head meatThe recipe directs that the brains be taken out and does not say what becomes of them. In many countries the sale of bovine and ovine brain is now restricted outright as specified risk material; pig brain is less commonly offered at retail than it once was.
- What "dressed with peas" meansThe recipe gives a shorter cure for a cheek to be dressed with peas and a longer one for a cheek dressed without them. The usual reading is that the peas, cooked with the meat, take up some of its salt, so less curing was wanted; the longer cure gave a saltier cheek eaten on its own.
- If you want the dishCured pig's cheek and Bath chap are still made commercially and by butchers working to measured cures. Buy one already cured, or work from a current curing recipe that states nitrite quantities by weight and a refrigerated cure temperature.