Head Cheese, Souse, and Your Path to Enlightenment
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade (or a super-lit visual album). When life hands you a pig’s head, it would behoove you to make head cheese or souse—two closely-related, rustic meat loaves made by boiling down a pig’s head, tucking the scraps into a mold, chilling, slicing, and serving. How this pig’s head happens to trot on into your life, that’s your business. Pig heads happen. They’re not an anomaly. There’s pretty much one per every four legs and splendid belly, and it would be a terrible shame to waste one—especially when there’s so much rich, succulent meat in there, plus the bones. My god. The bones. A head is chock-a-block with bones, and simmering them down for a few hours brings out the rich gelatin that binds the meat together. That’s plenty of people’s nexus of yuck when it comes to head cheese (which BTW, involves no dairy) and souse (which is pretty much just head cheese with extra vinegar), but if you’re down with bone broth, you’re halfway there. It’s all just meat water at various levels of gelatinousness, but then again, so are we, man. So are we.