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Smoked Pig Jowl, with Spinach
Procure half a smoked pig jowl and plunge it into two gallons boiling water boil for two hours. Lift up, tear off the skin and neatly trim all around. Prepare a spinach a 1'Anglaise dress on a hot dish, arrange the jowl over the spinach and serve.
A two-line recipe that assumes you know two things: how to handle a cured cut and what spinach à l'anglaise means. Both are worth spelling out.
- The jowl itselfSmoked pig jowl is the cured, smoked cheek of the hog, sold whole or halved and weighing roughly 1-2 lb a piece. Butchers and Southern-leaning markets still carry it; smoked pork hock or a piece of slab bacon is the nearest substitute, though neither has the same gelatinous texture.
- Taste the water before you trust the recipeCures a century ago were often heavier than today's, and old-style jowl may need a soak of several hours, or a first boil poured off and replaced, before it is fit to eat. Break off a fleck after twenty minutes of simmering and judge; if it is punishing, change the water.
- Two gallons is not a mistakeTwo gallons is probably no mistake -- the volume most likely serves to dilute the salt as much as to cook the meat. Use a stockpot that holds the meat easily under water and keep it topped up.
- Boil means simmerBoil, but gently -- the recipe says boil, yet a hard two-hour boil shreds the cheek and toughens the lean. Bring it up, then hold it at a bare shiver, around 190F on a modern stove. Two hours suits a half jowl; it is done when a skewer slides through the thickest part without resistance.
- Skin and trim while hotThe rind peels away cleanly in the first minute or two out of the pot and fights you once it cools. Trim the outer fat back to a thin even layer before slicing.
- Spinach à l'anglaisePlainly boiled spinach: cook it briefly in a large volume of well-salted water, drain hard, press out the liquid, then chop roughly and warm through with butter, salt and pepper. No cream, no nutmeg-heavy béchamel. Allow about 1 lb raw spinach for every two people, as it collapses to almost nothing.
- Skip salting the greens twiceThe jowl leaves plenty of salt on the plate. Season the spinach lightly and finish with a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of the cooking liquor rather than more salt.
- YieldHalf a jowl, sliced thin across the grain, serves three or four as a main course with the spinach beneath it.
Hog jowl belongs to the economy of whole-animal butchery: the cheek is muscular, fatty and cheap, and curing and smoking it turned an awkward scrap into a keeping meat that could flavour a pot of greens for weeks. In the American South it became a fixture of the New Year's table alongside black-eyed peas and collards, a pairing generally explained as a wish for prosperity in the coming year. What is striking here is the treatment: Filippini's International Cook Book sets the jowl on a bed of spinach dressed à l'anglaise and serves it as a plated course, which is French restaurant grammar applied to a country cut. That collision is the point of the book, which ranged across national kitchens and repeatedly gave homely ingredients the Delmonico's-style presentation its author had spent his career in.