To Make Head Cheese and New England Style Ham Solid
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the meat
Mix 10 to 12 pounds of Bull Meat Brand Sausage Binder into 100 pounds of meat.
Let the mixture sit according to your State Pure Food Law for proper binding.
For New England Style Ham, cut pork trimmings to the size of an egg.
Mix 1 pound of Freeze Em Pickle with every 100 pounds of meat, without adding salt.
Cure and season
Refrigerate the meat for a week to thicken the juices.
After a week, add ½ pound of salt and season with Zanzibar Brand Seasoning.
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
What each ingredient does
- Meat
- Forms the bulk of the head cheese, providing the protein that sets into a sliceable loaf.
- Bull-meat-brand sausage binder
- Helps the meat hold together and bind into a firm, sliceable mass.
- Freeze-em-pickle
- Cures the meat, contributing color and a characteristic cured flavor.
- Salt
- Seasons the meat and helps draw out and firm up its proteins during curing.
The step that matters
Refrigerate the meat for a week. Holding the meat cold for the full week lets the cure work and the juices thicken, while keeping the meat safe from spoilage bacteria. Shortening or warming this rest risks both poor binding and spoilage.
“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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