Tag Archives: Fat

Making Headcheese

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No Cheese Needed: I spent a pleasant warm day yesterday making headcheese. Here is a post from the archives about the same.

Fromage de tete, coppa di testa, brawn, presskopf or souse, we are speaking here, of course, of headcheese, a frighteningly disgusting term for what turns out to be a delicious dish. The old saying that with a pig you eat everything but the “squeal” is true.

All porky goodness.

All porky goodness.

“If we are going to live on other inhabitants of this world we must not bind ourselves with illogical prejudices, but savor to the fullest the beasts we have killed. Why is it worse, in the end, to see an animal’s head cooked and prepared for our pleasure than a thigh or a tail or a rib?” M.F. K. Fisher

Our new processor asked last year when I delivered four hogs if I wanted the heads. Immediately I knew that headcheese was in my future. But, time and energy interfered. The heads lay bundled up at the bottom of the freezer, forgotten, and eventually pitched at the dump. A year later, last week, another hog delivered and the same question. And, yes, was my answer.

So Saturday morning I hauled out the head, ears and trotters and placed them in the sink. Using Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe for headcheese from the River Cottage Cookbook I gathered up onions from our garden, and clove, coriander, nutmeg, peppercorns, 1/2 cup of red pepper flakes from the larder. Added a big bundle of thyme, rosemary and parsley from the herb garden and got to work. Using my butcher saw I quartered the heads (I no longer do this step) so that it would fit into the pot easily. Adding the head, ears, trotters, onions, seasoning and herbs to a biggish pot of water and brought that to a boil. Once at a boil it smelled a bit like a crab boil.

Next step is to skim of the scum that floats to the top for about 30 minutes then reduce to a simmer for four hours. After four hours the meat and bones are removed. The liquid is reduced by 2/3 to a gelatinous soup. Next I pulled the meat from the head and jaw and finally chopped into a hash, peeled the skin of the tongue and did the same. Then mixed in a good sized clump of fresh parsley (chopped) and juice of a lemon (many use apple vinegar) and put the mixture in the fridge.

When the liquid was reduced it was strained into another pot. The onions and bundle of herbs were tossed. The meat mixture was then pressed into a terrine and the liquid was ladled over the top. Placed back into the fridge until the jelly set.

What a nice way to create a delicious dish from some very inelegant ingredients. I do recommend using the head next time for those of you who raise or buy a side of pork from time to time. Talk about nose to tail eating!

I’d close by recommending three other books, a holy trinity of sorts, dedicated to the concept that nothing gets wasted. They are all by Jennifer McLagan. Bones, Fat, and Odd Bits. Each is beautifully produced and full of wonderful recipes: Ex.  a hearty dish of ravioli made of brains and morels.

Now, where did I put my brains?

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Reading this weekend: Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: essays from a farmer philosopher by Frederick L. Kirschenman

Our Local Table

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We were sitting around last night during the lightning storm. Our neighbor Tim was playing the banjo while we talked. We were eating bowls of chili verde and gently arguing the merits of what a local food culture means. There were six of us for our monthly discussion, as much a convivial outing as it was a chance to exercise the gray matter.

In an era of global food distribution what is a local cuisine? I remember the awkward first outing by the Knoxville Slow Food chapter when they hosted a kimchi workshop. One can certainly use local ingredients to make kimchi, and we do. But hosting that workshop highlighted the difficulty of defining a local cuisine in this global economy and era of global migration.

When the current epoch declines, as it surely will, and we are left to pick up the pieces, what will our local table look like? All the various peoples will certainly add a mixture to that table. But the table will be influenced by what is producible in the local food shed. Your post-global cooking culture will probably still have access to imported foods. But, if coming from any distance then they will be expensive and used more for special celebratory events.

Waverly Root, in his excellent The Food of France, organizes the culinary regions based on the fat used in cooking. Which I always thought was a marvelous way to view local cooking: butter, lard, goose fat or oil. It made sense to me. All of our cooking begins with the base fat used to add flavor. The fat used in non-global cuisines is a product of your land base. A nice Mediterranean climate and you will use olive oil in your cooking. A more mountainous land or one composed of poorer soils and you are more likely to use lard or goose fat, a land composed of rich pasture land and the cooking will be based on butter. The fat used in cooking seems as convenient a way as any to explore the local table.

But for many regions of this country what could be or what was a local table is now buried beneath so many Costco’s, Trader Jo’s and Walmart’s at the intersection of an interstate commerce. That table, if glimpsed, has a museum like quality.  Like a carefully curated exhibit of old cookbooks to remind us what our table may look like again in the future.

I’m fortunate to have come from a cuisine in south Louisiana that is still vibrant and has survived the global march, largely intact. But after thirty years in Tennessee I only catch rare sightings of what an indigenous cooking culture here would look like. But that table, when it does emerge, will consist of what we raise in this, our particular food-shed. My guess is that lard and butter will once again reign supreme and define the table. And olive oil will be a mere Mary Celeste of the imagination, ghosting along the coast in search of a port.