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Head Cheese

Head cheese is a meat jelly made from a hog's head boiled in salted water, then cooled and set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,518 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Head Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Dress the hog's head.

  2. Remove excess fat.

  3. Cover the head with water.

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

  5. Season the cooking water with coarse sea salt, celery salt, onion salt, bay leaf, and onion.

Make the stock

  1. Remove the head from the stock.

  2. Concentrate the stock to ¼ of its original volume.

Set the head cheese

  1. Cut the meat into small pieces.

  2. Reserve some for scrapple if desired.

  3. Reheat the meat in the concentrated stock.

  4. Pour into a mold to cool and set.

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. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 gelatin-rich connective tissue that set the head cheese as it cools.
Water
Extracts flavour and gelatin from the bone and meat during slow cooking, forming the stock.
Bay leaf
Adds a subtle aromatic, herbal note to the cooking stock.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until the meat falls from the bone. Slow, gentle cooking lets collagen in the connective tissue break down into gelatin, which later makes the stock set. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and cloud the stock.

“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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