[Sca-cooks] snails and puppy dog tails...

[Philip Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Fri, 2011-01-28 at 12:13 +1300, Antonia wrote:

> > i love brawn and hogs head cheese and pickled pig feet with souse (okay.... those would be weird LOL!) but dislike jellied consumme.  my husband is just the opposite.
> 
> I eat all that stuff, given the opportunity.   I think I could probably 
> serve some sort of cold brawn for lunch without any real concern... 
> mmm... cold brawn. cold chicken, rye bread, apples...

I prepared about 50 pounds of faux head cheese / jellied brawn for an
Icelandic-themed event about two years ago, for which, by rights, I had
wanted to do jellied sheep's head, but I figured not everyone would eat
it, I might as well go with a cheap and readily available meat, so
pernil pork shoulder / hands were on sale for something ridiculous like
$.59/lb, as I recall.

I brined the shoulders, simmered them, peeled the skin off in pieces as
large as I could manage, lined a mold, packed the meat and a little of
the fat that I pulled in big chunks off the bone, and layered more rind
on top. Reduced the stock, poured it over the meat, pressed and chilled.

A few people were horrified because they thought it was actual head
cheese. I explained it wasn't; it just looked and tasted a bit like it,
but was shoulder.

I served it with platters of gravlax and a mustard sauce for both, and
got back about a pound and a half of the stuff after it was served...
people came back to me and said they wouldn't have dreamed they would
ever eat such a thing voluntarily, and couldn't explain why they did,
still felt fairly sure they wouldn't have tried it for anybody but me,
but they were glad they did. And this was not my home group... they
would probably have eaten it, too.

Adamantius