Head Cheese-mmmmm-smells bad- tastes good

http://nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1060235717218250.xml

The link above will bring you to a great article about making head cheese. Traditional and non traditional and includes a couple of recipes. Before you rush out for you heads, let me warn you, this stuff is not really an olfactory celebration in the first stages of cooking. My mom has been making it for Christmas all my life and we used to run on Head Cheese day. But oh boy is it good to eat. You can fancy it up all you want with swell gourmet toast points and Carr's Bisquits and whatnot, but I like it best with a little Zatarain's mustard on top of a crispy saltine. Now that my friends is some good eating Louisiana style

quote:

Originally posted by Mayhaw Man
You can fancy it up all you want with swell gourmet toast points and Carr's Bisquits and whatnot, but I like it best with a little Zatarain's mustard on top of a crispy saltine. Now that my friends is some good eating Louisiana style

Different but related: Try Bellue's Chicken Glace sometime. If you're afraid of head cheese, this will be a pleasant surprise. Looks kind of like hc, but isn't made with anything you wouldn't recognize as 'food' if you saw it on the table. Delicious, too.

Unfortunately, their on-line catalogue doesn't seem to give descriptions of their products, but here's a link to it, with toll-free numbers:

http://www.belluescajuncuisine.com/pages/11/index.htm

Mayhaw, my grandfather loved it, but I won't be competing with you over the supply. I just could never bring myself to eat it.

My grandmother would make it and leave it out in pans to jell, god that stuff was scary.

Allright, enough already. Perhaps it's something genetic. I love the stuff. Can't get enough. Then again, you can't judge anything by me, I am pretty willing to eat anything, no matter it's origin, as long as the person cooking/preparing it can make it taste good (tastes lahk chikken ta me)

But the real reason I listed the link is that the woman who wrote the article for the Picayune did a really great job of combining the history of the food, the culture\social anthropology of the area up river from NOLA, and the dying traditions of a culture that will be gone(or at least severely decreased) with the passing of what is now popularly called "The Best Generation". As you may have noticed,, I kind of like to combine the past and the present when it comes to food (sadly, if you look in the fridge at my house right now you can see why living in the past can be a bad science project, but I usually don't eat any history with green hairs growing out of it)

quote:

Originally posted by Mayhaw Man

Allright, enough already. Perhaps it's something genetic. I love the stuff. Can't get enough...

Don't get me wrong; I loved the article. I also love to read the history of food, and just about everything else. I also love that this guy is making it the way he's always made it.

Wish I liked it, especially since it was a favorite of my Grandfather. It's just a "texture" issue with me...

I personally don't like the stuff, but a lot of it is made, consumed, and sold in the PA Dutch areas of Pennsylvania. BTW, PA Dutch is not dutch of Dutch descent, it's a mispelling of Deutsche; so, PA Dutch is actually PA German, thus the love for head cheese.

I did not know until I read about the French Cajun gentleman discussed in the website above that headcheese was the same as souse meat.

My grandfather who was a farmer in upper eastern Tennessee known as Cumberland Gap had a large farm. Each year at Thanksgiving, they would make a community event out of killing hogs. It was done this time of the year because of the usual temperature remained very cool all day. Lunch was served for all who helped and always consisted of fresh porkchops, corn bread and very fresh veggies. My grandmother and others would can the pork and the men would start the curing process for the many hams that would fill the smoke house.

Then they would make the souse meat. I did not know what it was and I would partake. Hell, I was to young to know any better as this was in the 1940's and I was very young at the time.

At the end of the day, my grandfather and his friends would do about two hours of quail hunting, come back and have some springcooled souse meat with some "soda crackers" along with some of the counties best corn libation and the day would usually terminate with the ladies cleaning up and the men going on a all night fox hunt which I always assumed was an excuse to further enjoy souse meat, corn liquor setting around a fire listening to the dogs chase some poor crafty fox. Sometimes the dogs got lost for weeks, but seemed like they always showed up. My grandfather sometimes found the dogs in the next county.

I do not thing I am a fan of souse meat.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN