You always see head cheese in groceries or delis. But do you ever buy it? Does anyone? Have you ever seen anyone with it in their shopping cart, or at checkout? Yet some folks must be buying it, because it's out there. Year after year, head cheese - despite many compelling factors arguing otherwise - remains part of the fabric of American life.

What gives? And what's in it?

Foodreference.com has an answer for that last one:

Head cheese, also called souse and brawn, is a jellied loaf or sausage. Originally it was made entirely from the meaty parts of the head of a pig or calf, but now can include edible parts of the feet, tongue, and heart. The head is cleaned and simmered until the meat falls from the bones, and the liquid is a concentrated gelatinous broth. Strained, the meat is removed from the head, chopped, seasoned and returned to the broth and the whole placed in a mold and chilled until set, so it can be sliced.

Calf head? Mad cow alert? Not. If there's any "head" in head cheese these days, it's pork head. And many versions go a step further, using pork butt or shoulder in place of the head and other less-appealing parts. One highfalutin' version even works in red bell peppers.

All this ratchets up the palatability. Somewhat. But head cheese still looks like odds and ends of stuff in a jellied loaf, that's been sliced. I mean, really, pass the salami, huh?

For something so queasy and quivering to make it this far down the line, there'd have to be a story. You'll get some of that here, in a fine New Orleans Times-Picayune article about an old guy in Cajun country who makes his own head cheese. (Free reg. req.). The Germans and French brought the recipes with them to the American South. People were just trying to get by. Waste not, want not. All that.

This Texas "historical foods" essayist has more on the Texas-German connection to head cheese; plus the skinny on scrapple, blood sausage, and a stew made of beef organ meats, that cowboys used to love (supposedly).

Still, some disturbing questions persist with regard to head cheese, at least where an actual hog's head is involved. Bloviating Inananities gets down to it, as only a such-named blog could.

Head cheese: ultimately, it's a personal decision.

I must duly note that someone makes "moose head cheese." (As it happens, that recipe comes from a great online collection, the Axe-Woodsman cookbook. It also includes tasty treatments of crow, and starling).

Myself, I make a nice fish stock with fish heads and a bunch of other stuff - which all gets discarded after the stock is strained. And I'll pick around the cheeks of a cooked fish, where there's some tasty meat.

When it comes to utilizing a hog's head, I think Mexican cooks have it all figured out. They put the cooked meat from the head in.....tamales. Mmm hmm.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 2, 2004 10:23 PM

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