What's Cooking with Dive? Pork Cheese (aka Head Cheese)

After yesterday's petite can of deliciousness, I feel it's time for a good Old Dive "TLDR" post (where those of you who've gotten used to FB can take one look and moan "Too Long, Didn't Read)."

So unlike the good old days of Blogville.

Anyhoo, yesterday's pork brains in milk gravy brought terrifying flashbacks of my early teen years, when I worked as a butcher's skivvy after school (before heading off to play gigs).

Looking back, I must confess I did learn some practical things during my tenure, such as how to peel and chop a hundred-odd onions without crying, taking the skins off whole with one single wrist-flick, how cow-cheek was one of the best parts of the cow, though back then it was only sold for dogs to eat, the joy of cubes of pork fat and how meltingly delicious they are and how it did no good tossing the mice the evil butcher trapped each night in the grain tub, over the wall to freedom as they'd only come straight back and I swear the old bugger put them in the mincer for sausages.

He did - a few years later - get condemned and was henceforth only allowed to sell pet food and nothing for human consumption; he reminded me a lot of Hilary Briss in The League of Gentlemen, peddling his "special stuff" under the counter.

I also learned to pluck and draw hundreds of bloody turkeys for the Christmas rush, how to knit sausages like a champion (four to the pound, bang on, every time), how to clean and dress tripe but more importantly how to spend the next fifteen years as a vegetarian.

"But what about pigs' brains?" I hear you clamour …

Well, my dears … gather round.

A couple of evenings a week I'd be sent out to the concrete shed at the back of the yard, where there stood several tall pressure cookers, each containing four whole pig's heads; tops undone, steaming away, all ready to scald the skin off my fingers.

First up, dredge one of the things out of the greyish filthy slop, marvelling at just how bloody heavy it is. Slap it down on the counter and enjoy one of the only good bits; attack the smegger with an enormous cleaver, straight down the middle … THWACK!

I actually got pretty good at that, though of course the first few weeks involved getting cussed at and and cuffed around the head and having to pick bone splinters out of the flesh.

Next up, scoop out the brains. Hot and squishy!

Then comes the nasty stuff; poking in the shrivelled eyes, tearing off the snout and yanking out the long, snot tubes, scouring out the palate, removing the tongue and ears and then stripping every scrap of steaming, reeking flesh off the skull, without getting any pig teeth falling into your quivering pile.

Throw the skull out onto the heap of offal and fly-covered rot that waits for the daily morning pick-up from the rubber-clad men in a truck … what the hell they did with it all afterwards doesn't bear thinking about.

Rinse and repeat until all the heads are stripped bare.

Keep the brains separate as them's good eating; toss the ears in a bucket for dog food, then set about chopping the remaining lava-hot quivering grey slop into half-inch chunks before mixing it all up with a load of aspic (jelly) and doling it all out into individual glass ramekins.

Eaten cold the next day they were rather yummy, though I had to blank out the previous evening's disgusting shenanigans every time I took a bite.

These days, of course, you may pay a fortune for pork cheese, trotters, tripe, udder, ears, tail, jot et al at monstrously pretentious nose-to-tail restaurants. If you have a pig, an enormous pressure cooker and a whopping great cleaver, you can make it yourself much cheaper.

Though I'd advise against it , having been there and done that …