Head Cheese
This is made of the head, ears and tongue of a pig.
Boil them in salted water until very tender, strip the meat from the bones and chop fine; season with salt, pepper, sage, sweet marjoram, a very little powdered cloves, and half a cupful of strong vinegar; mix all together thoroughly, taste to see if sufficiently seasoned, remembering that the spice tends to keep it, and pack hard in moulds; press down and keep the meat in shape by putting a plate on top and a weight upon this. In two days the cheese will be ready for use.
A working recipe that assumes you have a whole pig's head on the table and a cold larder to set it in. Neither is standard now, so most of the adaptation is about sourcing and temperature.
- The hinge: use the cooking liquidThe original says nothing about the broth, but head cheese sets on the gelatin the skin and connective tissue give up. If the chopped meat looks dry, reduce the strained cooking liquor until it is noticeably tacky between the fingers and mix in just enough to bind; without it the loaf can crumble when sliced.
- Sourcing the headOrder a split pig's head from a butcher, roughly 8-10 lb, and ask for it scraped and with the brain removed. Rinse the ear canals and nasal cavity thoroughly and check for bristle stubble before it goes in the pot; a wire brush and a scrape with a knife are worth the time.
- "Until very tender"That is about 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. The meat should slide off the jawbone and the ear cartilage should yield to a knife. Keep the pot barely trembling or the fat emulsifies into the stock and the finished loaf turns greasy.
- Season by weightNo quantities are given for the salt, pepper, sage, marjoram or cloves. For every 2 lb of chopped meat, start at 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1 teaspoon dried sage, 1/2 teaspoon marjoram and a scant 1/8 teaspoon cloves, and taste as instructed. Season warm meat, since it tastes flatter once cold.
- "The spice tends to keep it"It does not, in any meaningful sense. Vinegar and cloves slow spoilage slightly but this is a fresh cooked meat product, not a cured one. Treat it exactly as you would a fresh terrine.
- Set it coldPack the moulds, weight them with a plate and a couple of tins, and put the whole arrangement in the refrigerator for the full two days. A kitchen of this period had a cool cellar or a winter pantry; a modern room-temperature counter is well inside the range where cooked meat spoils.
- MouldsLoaf tins lined with plastic wrap or a plain terrine work; anything straight-sided so the weight presses evenly. Line them, or the loaf will not turn out.
- Yield and servingA single head gives roughly 3 to 4 lb of finished cheese, or two standard loaf tins. Slice thin and cold, with mustard, pickles or more vinegar. Eat within about five days, or freeze portions.
Head cheese contains no cheese; the name follows the older sense of "cheese" as anything pressed into a mould and turned out in a firm block, the same logic behind lemon cheese and damson cheese. Versions of it exist wherever pigs were killed at home in cold weather: fromage de tête in France, Sülze and Presskopf in German-speaking countries, souse in the English and Caribbean tradition when the vinegar is heaped on. It belongs to a kitchen where a butchered animal was expected to be used entirely, and the head and ears were among the most gelatinous parts, good for exactly this. The two-day press under a weighted plate assumes a cool cellar and a family that would work through several pounds of cold sliced meat inside a week.