As the pork chops harden in the deep freeze and the bacon, guinciale, and prosciutto lay encrusted in salt in the back porch fridge, I embark on yet another culinary adventure I've long anticipated: making head cheese.
Like most traditional French peasant dishes, fromage de tete combines gruesome ingredients with oodles and oodles of labor. So, you're unlikely to see it on a Red Robin menu anytime soon. I'm about half-way through the process time- and grossness-wise, and really just starting labor-wise.So, what is head cheese? It's not cheese, in fact contains no dairy, but is significantly head intensive. Once you've slaughtered and butchered your pig, shoved your curing cuts deep into rock salt, and begun brining your hams, mostly what you're left with are trotters and a head. What makes the trotters and head so qualitatively different from the rest of the animal is that the meat is hard to get to and it's in close proximity to a lot of joints.
Now, if you've ever had the courage to be curious about that Jello ingredient "gelatin" you already know it comes from the feet of animals and you've already made your peace one way of another with that. (although, Dylan decided one day to break into the ancient box of Jello mix in our pantry to see what this all-American favorite was all about, spent the afternoon waiting for it to set, then promptly threw the whole batch into the trash after 1 bite. "People eat this on purpose, Mom??" he asked.)
But, back to that head cheese. Basically, you clean up the head and/or feet, then split them with a very good, sharp cleaver (can't speak for the trotters, but this is no mean feat with the head - Dylan captured our experience on video it was so extreme), then boil them with aromatics for hours and hours. That's what's going on in my kitchen right now. I'm adding the tongue because it's all about using every bit and anyway, tongue is very flavorful.
In a little while, I will lift the halves of the head and the tongue out of the broth, let it all cool, then pull off the meat and skin, chop it very fine, and set it aside.
Then to the broth. I will finely strain the broth, removing all the aromatics and veggies and skimming any froth off. Not so different than making a basic chicken broth, right? The difference, which cannot be seen at the point, is that this broth that's been created by the cooking head (or feet) will contain all the gelatin that has leached out of the joints.
So, we strain it and set it out to cool. Meanwhile, we prepare a loaf pan by lining it with a big square of plastic wrap, leaving lots hanging over the sides.
When everything is cool, I'll grab a handful of the minced meat mixture and layer it on the bottom of the loaf pan. Then pour a layer of broth over, and keep repeating until I reach the top of the pan. Fold over the plastic wrap to cover it, then pop it in the fridge.
Twenty-four hours later - voila. An appetizer worthy of Julia herself, served with grainy mustard and cornichons on a bed of lettuce or dense, dark bread - like cheese, only yummy with porky goodness and actually quite low in fat.
UPDATE: So, I've completed the process with the first fromage de tete and almost completed it with the 2nd. Am waiting for the weekend to try the finished product with my loved ones and can share a photo of the end result out of its mold then.
Would I do this again? Not sure. It better be really, really yummy. I know for sure I wouldn't do it alone - this is serious It Takes a Village kind of cooking - a slaughter-event dish that many hands would help lighten. I think I would also seriously consider using the trotters instead of the head b/c the sheer size of a pig head makes everything about preparing this dish laborious.
All that said, I withhold judgement until after we try it!
And, merci beaucoup to our pal and culinary adventurer Chris who was kind enough to come over and both assist in the head-splitting (yes, we already made those jokes) and direct us on what the heck we were doing. There's some tete headed your way, mon ami.
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times spent 2 recent columns synthesizing US and European research regarding an alarming increase in the presence of MRSA (the sometimes-fatal strain of staph infection) in pigs and even retail pork products. A Dutch study found that hog farmers were 760 times more likely to test positive for staph than the general public. An even more recent American study suggests that between 25 and 39 percent of American hogs carry staph.
No one's proven yet that any of the 18,000 fatal cases of MRSA each year were contracted from eating pork, but staph is clearly no longer confined to hospitals.
And why are staph and other "superbugs" showing up in numbers that are ringing alarm bells in doctors' offices across the country? Well, it might just have something to do with the fact that factory meat lives its whole life on antibiotics - something your family doctor would lecture you at great length about if you suggested such a preventative approach at home.
I know I can be pedantic about local food. But, I just can't say it enough: Meet your meat. Know your spinach. Make sure there's a farmer in your life - even if they just drop off that box of delicious fruits and veggies once a week. This isn't just a food issue - it's a serious public health issue. We are allowing industrial food producers to not only sell us inadequate, sometimes dangerous, food - we are paying them to destroy one of the most powerful human health advances in history: the miracle of antibiotics. Let me be clear: We are losing the ability to treat infections with antibiotics.
But, Mr. Kristof says this all much more eloquently and powerfully than I can. Here is the 2nd of the 2 articles:
Pathogens in Our Pork
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 14, 2009
We don’t add antibiotics to baby food and Cocoa Puffs so that children get fewer ear infections. That’s because we understand that the overuse of antibiotics is already creating “superbugs” resistant to medication.
Yet we continue to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed so that piglets stay healthy and don’t get ear infections. Seventy percent of all antibiotics in the United States go to healthy livestock, according to a careful study by the Union of Concerned Scientists — and that’s one reason we’re seeing the rise of pathogens that defy antibiotics.
These dangerous pathogens are now even in our food supply. Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. And a recent study of retail meats in the Washington, D.C., area found MRSA in one pork sample, out of 300, according to Jianghong Meng, the University of Maryland scholar who conducted the study.
Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.
MRSA (pronounced “mersa”) stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. People often get it from hospitals, but as I wrote in my last column, a new strain called ST398 is emerging and seems to find a reservoir in modern hog farms. Research by Peter Davies of the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry MRSA.
Public health experts worry that pigs could pass on the infection by direct contact with their handlers, through their wastes leaking into ground water (one study has already found antibiotic-resistant bacteria entering ground water from hog farms), or through their meat, though there has been no proven case of someone getting it from eating pork. Thorough cooking will kill the bacteria, but people often use the same knife to cut raw meat and then to chop vegetables. Or they plop a pork chop on a plate, cook it and then contaminate it by putting it back on the original plate.
Yet the central problem here isn’t pigs, it’s humans. Unlike Europe and even South Korea, the United States still bows to agribusiness interests by permitting the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in animal feed. That’s unconscionable.
The peer-reviewed Medical Clinics of North America concluded last year that antibiotics in livestock feed were “a major component” in the rise in antibiotic resistance. The article said that more antibiotics were fed to animals in North Carolina alone than were administered to the nation’s entire human population.
“We don’t give antibiotics to healthy humans,” said Robert Martin, who led a Pew Commission on industrial farming that examined antibiotic use. “So why give them to healthy animals just so we can keep them in crowded and unsanitary conditions?”
The answer is simple: politics.
Legislation to ban the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture has always been blocked by agribusiness interests. Louise Slaughter of New York, who is the sole microbiologist in the House of Representatives, said she planned to reintroduce the legislation this coming week.
“We’re losing the ability to treat humans,” she said. “We have misused one of the best scientific products we’ve had.”
That’s an almost universal view in the public health world. The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared antibiotic resistance a “public health crisis” and recounts the story of Rebecca Lohsen, a 17-year-old New Jersey girl who died from MRSA in 2006. She came down with what she thought was a sore throat, endured months in the hospital, and finally died because the microbes were stronger than the drugs.
This will be an important test for President Obama and his agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack. Traditionally, the Agriculture Department has functioned mostly as a protector of agribusiness interests, but Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack have both said all the right things about looking after eaters as well as producers.
So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.
