The Fascinating History Of Head Cheese

If one of your hobbies is seeking out older, more obscure recipes, chances are you've seen some names that are very misleading. "Sweetbreads" are one example; these aren't pastries, as the name would have you believe, but rather the pancreas and thymus glands of animals. Contrasts like that lead to trust issues, so hearing about a dish named "head cheese" could understandably make you think twice about eating it.

Like many other oddly named recipes, head cheese isn't as strange as it sounds. Recipes often got their names from the cooking method involved or the dish in which the food was cooked. Over time, the older definitions and reasons for the name fade from general knowledge, so the name eventually sounds nonsensical. Head cheese is no exception, and as unappetizing as the name may be, the food itself is very basic, and when seasoned in a way you like, very tasty.

All head cheese is, is a specific type of aspic. Of course, if you fear aspics, too, that might not help. Yes, aspics have a terrifying reputation, but they really aren't that strange. In fact, they often helped a lot of people survive when they didn't have a lot of food. Aspics allowed cooks to do two things. For most people over most of history, aspics were a way to preserve perishable foods, and for richer people over most of history, aspics allowed them to show off their wealth. If you were serving aspics at your dinner parties, you likely had the money for kitchen staff who could oversee the long cooking time.

Head cheese is a fairly straightforward recipe. Different cultures put their own spin on it by using different aromatics to flavor the jelly and meat (although some recipes are just the basics of pork parts and salt), but in general, head cheese contains pig head parts like the ears and cheeks, spices and herbs, and possibly vinegar. Some variations include hot sauce or other aromatic vegetables. The ingredients are simmered for hours, and the mixture eventually solidifies as the pig head parts release gelatin.

Head cheese started out like most aspics, as a way to preserve meat. Encasing the meat in the jelly-like substance that would ooze out of bones, skin, and other animal parts helped seal it off from harmful bacteria. Head cheese and other similar aspics were ways for poorer people to preserve what little meat they got, which was usually scraps of unwanted parts from animals, like a hog's head. The better cuts were taken by wealthier upper-class families and royalty.

As the saying goes, "necessity is the mother of invention," and invent, they did. Head cheese is found in many European cuisines, from German presskopf/sulze to Greek pichti, and the recipes lean heavily on seasoning with garlic, onions, herbs, spices, and anything else that might have lent flavor. Interestingly, while head cheese was considered to be low-class, it was also considered by some to be very healthy.

When you see "cheese" on a menu, you don't expect to receive a slice of glistening, gelatinous pig head parts, so how on earth did head cheese get its bizarre name to begin with? The "head" refers to all the pig's head parts, of course, but the "cheese" may come from a couple of aspects. One is that cooks might have used cheese molds to form the loaves of jellied meat, and the other is that the final texture of head cheese often has a similar texture to that of spreadable dairy cheese. By the way, English isn't the only language that uses "cheese" in head cheese; in Dutch, it's known as hoofdkaas (kaas means cheese), and in French, it's called fromage de tete (fromage is cheese).

If the use of "cheese" to refer to a meat product sounds strange now, it really shouldn't. People online have pointed out that other dairy terms have been adopted for use with foods that wouldn't fall into the dairy category, such as the use of "curd" in lemon curd. While lemon curd can contain butter, it's not typically seen as a butter or milk product. But look up older lemon curd recipes, and what do you find? The use of lemon juice to curdle milk and create curds, plus a much older name for the recipe: lemon cheese.

Head cheese from pigs and hogs wasn't limited to just North America. Other cultures also figured out that boiling certain pig parts would eventually produce a jelly that could preserve meat. If you eat a lot of Vietnamese food, you've likely encountered giò thủ, a rolled form of head cheese that combines pig head parts with shallots and other accompaniments. Giò thủ is served sliced into rounds. Another Vietnamese dish, thịt đông, is similar but combines pork with vegetables in a gelatin base.

Korean cuisine also has a form of head cheese called pyeonyuk. Recipes for pyeonyuk may also use beef, but pork pyeonyuk includes pressed pig head meat. The amount of gelatinous material in pyeonyuk may not be as visible as it is in other forms of head cheese, but there's enough so that, when you press the cooked meat together, the gelatin helps all the bits stick so that the meat forms a nice, compact block that you can then slice.

Head cheese served as an economical way to get a meal out of offal and other parts from the Middle Ages well into the 20th century. If you were poor and weren't sure how much meat you'd get in the future, you wanted to grab and preserve every scrap you could find. The process of cooking the hog parts let cooks do both; the initial cooking loosened as much meat as possible, which they could then pick off, and the rest of the cooking process would create the jelly that would eventually encase and preserve the meat.

Aspics as a whole had been considered a sign of culinary prowess for a long time, but the ingredients in head cheese initially restricted it to the realm of poverty food. However, richer households began to serve head cheese in the American colonies in the 1700s. While poorer families and enslaved people still made it, it was considered to be a relatively nice breakfast food in some colonies. It was often served to guests along with other upscale foods to signal that the household was doing well financially. A British cookbook from the early 1700s also positioned head cheese as a food for wealthier households. Nowadays, head cheese doesn't have exactly the same connotations. If you serve it, it's not going to really say much about your financial status because it's become more of a traditional food, rather than a necessity.

Plenty of cuisines around the world have some version of head cheese, but the state of Louisiana stands out among other U.S. states for its use of the meaty loaf. While much of the South in general has included head cheese in its meals at one point or another, it became a staple of southern Louisiana food, sold in most butcher shops and delis as "hog's head cheese" or "souse." Some have given it the nickname of "Cajun pate."

Hog's head cheese is so intertwined with southern Louisiana cuisine that the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, a joint project from Slow Food Italy and Slow Food International, included the dish in its "Ark of Taste," a project that catalogs culturally important, traditional foods that may be at risk of disappearing. The foundation noted that a generational divide, in which younger people were not developing a taste for the dish, increases the chance that knowledge of Louisiana hog's head cheese could eventually disappear.

The past few years have seen a gradual re-emergence of aspics, although they haven't become widely prized like they were back in the 1800s. The stereotypical aspics of the 1950s, with just about every known food packed into a Jell-O mold, have become objects of fascination among groups that like to see what monstrosities they can construct. However, less-quirky recipes such as tomato aspic are making their way back onto menus at restaurants, as are many meat-based aspics that use fresh, high-quality ingredients. And there are aspics from European and Asian cuisines that never went out of style, such as Ukrainian kholodets and the meat jelly used in making soup dumplings.

Head cheese hasn't gotten the same amount of attention in terms of returning to the menu at many restaurants. In fact, when people first hear the term "head cheese," their reaction isn't always printable. But it's still made in some regions, and more people in forums online have discussed how to make it in the past few years. Some of these newer head cheese recipes fuse flavors from different cuisines, such as head cheese that includes ingredients from Cuban recipes. Those who try it often find that it tastes a lot better than they had expected, too. So, it may not have the same revival status as aspics in general, but more people are becoming aware of it and what they can do with it.