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Head-cheese

Head cheese is a cold meat jelly made from hog head meat set in its own stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Head-cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Dress the hog's head.

  2. Remove excess fat from the head.

  3. Cover the head with water.

  4. Cook slowly until the meat falls from the bones.

  5. Season the cooking water with salt, pepper, and sage.

Make the stock and meat

  1. Remove the meat from the stock.

  2. Concentrate the stock to half its original volume.

  3. Cut the meat into small pieces, reserving some for scrapple.

  4. Reheat the meat in the stock.

Set the head cheese

  1. Pour the meat into a mold.

  2. Cool and set the mold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Hog's head
Provides the meat and connective tissue that give the head cheese its body.
Sage
Adds an herbal aroma that flavours the cooking stock and the finished set meat.
Black pepper
Adds a mild, sharp aroma that seasons the stock and meat.

The step that matters

Concentrate the stock to half its original volume. The gelatin released from bones and connective tissue is what makes the cooled stock set. If the stock stays too thin and watery, the mold may not firm up properly, so reducing it concentrates that gelatin.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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