Lincolnshire Haslet – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 14

Wow. The last day of nose to tail fortnight and my eating along the animal challenge.

How do I feel? Full of meat. I’ve got a craving for cauliflower.

How far along the animal did I get? All the way, baby!

Here is the full nose to tail body part list: pig head, cow foot, pig lung, cow heart, deer kidney, chicken liver, cow stomach, lamb testicle, pig trotter, cow tail, sausages and caul fat.

Haslet seemed a fitting way to end my nose to tail fortnight. Here is what wikipedia says:

Haslet, also spelt ‘Acelet’, is a porkmeatloaf with herbs originally from Lincolnshire, England. The name is derived from the Old Frenchhastilles meaning entrails^[1].

In Lincolnshire, haslet (pronounced hayzleht locally), is a meatloaf typically made from stale white bread, ground pork, sage, salt and black pepper.^[2] It is typically served cold with pickles and salad, or as a sandwich filling.^{[citation needed]}

Basically it is offal and off-cuts ground up with sage, salt and pepper; the pressed out of it; wrapped in caul fat; then baked. I haven’t tried to make it myself, mostly because Hargreaves of Spalding make the best ones and I try to alway have one in my Leeds-based freezer. It freezes really well and defrosts gently over-night.

I like to eat the end slices by themselves. As well as eating it cold, you can also fry it up and have it warm. A very versatile pork product indeed. The top should be a darker colour (due to the baking). If you look carefully at the picture above, you can see the pattern of the caul fat on the top. The caul keeps the haslet bound together.

In my sandwich on Sunday, I added fresh sage leaves and a few leaves of Jack-by-the-hedge. That made an excellent sandwich.

Don’t buy the stuff from the supermarket deli counter. It is minging. If you do, I’ll play you this Cyndi Lauper clip very early in the morning, so you faint from over-exposure to Shaggy. That’s real threat.

If you’d like to try a proper one, it can be arranged. You can either find a proper Lincolnshire butcher (if he doesn’t rub his hands together, he’s not the real deal) or send me a message and I can be your dealer.

Another Lincolnshire delicacy to try is Stuffed Chine. Shaggy loves it.*

 

*I imagine he does.

Using up the Head – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 10

So, today is using up the head day. Both Daz and I surveyed Arthur with some trepidation this morning. We loved you, but not neccessarily your constituent parts. What to do? A few years ago I would have binned him. Not so now. But hwat can you make out of a scavenged pig head? Well stock obviously, but what of all that fat?

So I made a decision. Yes Arthur’s head is going to become stock, but first I am going to fish out any meat and all that fat. The meat can go in my cheese toastie. Yum. The fat I shall render down and make LARD. Yes ladies and gentlemen. Lard will be on the menu very soon (but not today because I had to go to work).

Here Arthur is stocking away merrily.

You can see his palate has come away from the roof of his mouth now! The stock does look amazing. I’m going to make delicious things with it.

And here is my dinner bowl of tomato soup. Plus dripping on toast! Oh yes. How Yorkshire have I become with my mucky fat dinner butty? Still a bit southern – it’s toasted, like what that Jamie Oliver would do to a chee-ar-batter!

Roast Head of Pig – Nose to Tail Fortnight Day 9

So I roasted the head of a pig today. It was meant to be done on Friday, but I’m at work now, instead of at home, so we brought the piece de resistance forward.

Here is Arthur. He is sitting in the sink, waiting to have his ears and nostrils scrubbed and to have a shave. Like a recalcitrant husband (that’s you Willie Thorne).

I can tell you that pig’s noses feel lovely. You need to prepare your head. This means shaving off bristles (I used a Bic razor) and then scrubbing the inside of the ears to get the wax out. I found an old toothbrush was an excellent tool for that job. In truth, Arthur didn’t need very much shaving or scrubbing. I did think he had very big ears though.

And his little number was on the back of his ear too:

There are lots of recipes online for the roasting of a pig’s head. Basically you put it in the oven for about five hours, covering the nose and the ears with tin foil about half way through. Temperature about Gas Mark 4 (but on the warm side of that).You can rub some spices into his skin and the flesh at the back of his head. I chose some cajun spice mix from the health food shop. I then basted the head all the while with a mixture of honey and water about every hour while it was cooking. I’m not sure whether that was actually a good idea.

Here he is with his little ear-and-nose-cosies on.

Got quite the tan, hasn’t he?

So what do you do when you’ve got your roast pig’s head out of the oven? Well, if you’re me, panic a little. When I worked for the Hog Roasting doing bits of butchery, the pigs almost alway arrived headless. If they did have a head, it was to be cooked separately generally because it was a Filipino Christening. (A bigger Filipino population than you would imagine in Lincolnshire.) So I umm’ed said I’m not sure a few times. Then got busy with scissors, a knife and a fork.

I was tipped off on twitter that the meat in the temple was the sweetest, so I pulled that out. Then I found some lovely juicy meat that ran along the snout. Then I went in for the cheek. We’ve had cheeks before (post here), but what I didn’t know was that they were under a thick layer of fat. In fact fat was encountered pretty much everywhere I looked on Arthur’s head (apart from his ears). Much more fat than I could really cope with to be honest. Maybe if I’d cooked him an hour longer more of it would have melted but there was quite a lot. Also, I couldn’t find a way of getting into the skull to get at the brains. Poor planning.

Anyway, Daz and I both had a plate each of very tender meat. The best bits were the temple and snout bits.  And now I have half a pig’s head to recycle into more edible things. I would say brawn, but I’m going to saw that for later in the year. I’m sure I’ll think of some things.

What would I do differently next time? Cook for an hour longer. Get the butcher to split the head in half and roast two halves. Score the skin so Arthur II looks a bit like Darth Maul. No honey. An apple in his mouth. LOLLLLLZZZZZZZZ.

In all seriousness, nothing I’ve cooked so far has brought me closer to the animal. Arthur has eyes (AND EYELASHES – I couldn’t bring myself to shave them) and a face and I’m sure he had a personality in whatever farm (since I bought him for £2.50 at Bennets butcher in Leeds market, I’m not sure it was a skippy-happy farm, but the local vs. organic is an issue that repeats) he grew up in. Now I have him, I’m not going to waste him. Even though the bits that are left aren’t, perhaps, to my taste.

But then, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Being less wasteful, encouraging myself to be more creative and eating in a sustainable manner. Most of all, being responsible for all the meat I put in my mouth and making sure I make the right decisions about it. I’m sure Arthur would agree!

Oink.

That was Arthur, agreeing from a chopping board in Beeston.

Pork chaps … not: pork, chaps?

A pork chap is a pig cheek. They seem to be having a bit of a moment and you can buy them pre-packed in my local Morrisons. You can however buy just packs of pig skin in my local Morrisons. Either it is offal central in Kirkstall, or there are lots of trainee tattooists fuelling demand. It is good though. You can get 3 for 97p. I’m sure this isn’t actually very bargainous, but heigh ho, fuel the conglomerates we must!

This recipe I made up entirely out of all of my own head. I say this, because as I am reviewing the ingredients, it sounds … well, a bit weird. However I do know it was delicious. TRUFAX.

Here I am holding a pig cheek, next to my cheek. Whatever will I think of next?

I am also doing an oink at this point. My face doesn't always have such a sultry pout on it

This was another piece of slow cooker magic. Slow cookers are magic. Everybody needs one! You can even bake in them!

Ingredients: 6 pork cheeks, 4 tbsp flour, 2 tsp caraway seeds, 1 tsp sugar, knob of butter, half tsp nutmeg, 2 chopped carrots, 2 sticks chopped celery, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp caraway seeds, 1 tbsp japonica jelly, half a pint of Lahloo Smoky tea (or another lapsang souchong) that has been brewing for at least 30 minutes, 100ml red wine.

1. Brew your tea. I used 1 tbsp to a teapot and had a cup while I did the rest of the preparations.
2. Mix flour, 2 tsp caraway and sugar in a bowl. Dip cheeks into mix so they are well covered.
3. Melt butter in a frying pan, then fry the cheeks on each side for til they are sealed.
4. Transfer all frying pan contents to slow cooker.
5. Add vegetables and other ingredients to slow cooker, including any of the flour mixture that is left over. (Make sure the tea has brewed for long enough.)
6. Cook on high for about five hours. The cheeks will just melt away into the sauce.

I also made apple dumplings to go on top. You follow the dumpling recipe on the suet packet, but add a chopped apple to the mix. You then put them in about an hour before you want to eat. So this was after 4 hours of cooking:

Looking back on this recipe, it seems I’ve brought up a few questions i.e. white wine with pork? a tea-based casserole? what is a japonica? why has the stew gone purple? veg in sticks not rounds in a stew? To you, I say, well I steal someone else’s words, whose I can’t quite remember, but, to you say “What is that? A rule? A convention? HIIIIIIIIIYAHHHHHHHH” *motion of karate chopping wood*

When you cook the face of an animal, you need to take some risks.