Calf’s Head à la Terrapin

Carefully clean a calf’s head and put it into a cooker-pail. Cover it with boiling water, add one teaspoonful of salt to each quart of water and let it boil for twenty minutes. Put it into a cooker for nine hours or more. Cool it and cut the face meat into small dice. Make a cupful of sauce using the butter, flour, pepper, one-half teaspoonful of salt and one cupful of the water in which the head was boiled. Add the cream and, when boiling, the raw yolks of two eggs which have been slightly beaten. Stir it constantly for about two minutes until the eggs have cooked. Then add two tablespoonfuls of Madeira wine and the yolks of two [hard-cooked eggs] cut into quarters.

Serves five or six persons.

XV
PORK

Whatever may be true of the extent to which pork and pork products are wholesome for particular individuals, there can be no doubt that its delicious flavour will insure its being eaten by a large number of people who either do not know or do not care whether it agrees with them or not. Experiments undertaken under the management of the Department of Agriculture[1] have resulted in the conclusion that pork is as thoroughly and easily digested, under normal conditions of health, as any meat, although personal experience would indicate that pork does not agree with some people as well as other kinds of meat. It is specially important, however, that pork be very well cooked or well cured, in order to insure against the danger from trichinosis. We are told by B. H. Ransom[2] that it is only by eating raw or insufficiently cooked or cured pork that there is thought to be any danger of this disease. Curing is the process of smoking, salting, or combined salting and smoking of meat, which acts as a preservative for it. We thus see that, not only because it is a white meat, as mentioned in the chapter on [veal], pork and pork products should be cooked until very well done.

[1] Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin 193, 1907.

[2] U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Bureau of Animal Industry, Circular 108, 1907.

As pork is the fattest of all meats, it is suitable for a cold-weather diet and will probably be found to agree better at that season. For whatever reason it may be, fresh pork seems to be less wholesome than when cured, bacon having the reputation of being one of the most easily digested of all fats.

Young pigs (four weeks old) are frequently dressed and roasted whole.

Figure No. 10.
Diagram of the cuts of pork.

Pork is usually cut for market in the manner illustrated in [figure No. 10].

The back is fat and is used for salt pork or lard. The ribs are used for spare-ribs, and the loin or chine, which is the backbone with its adhering meat, is used for roasts or chops. The legs are roasted, if fresh, or they are cured, by salting and smoking, for hams, sugar being used in the salting process, which gives the name “sugar-cured hams”; the shoulders are treated in the same way and may be used very much as hams, although the flesh is not so thick and the proportion of bone is greater. The belly is cured for bacon, the head and feet are soused or pickled, and the trimmings of fat and lean are chopped, highly seasoned, and used for sausage, or combined with meal and made into scrapple.

To select fresh pork. The meat should be firm and of a pale red colour, the fat hard and white and the skin white and clear. Yellowish fat, with kernels in it, and soft, flabby flesh are an indication of inferior pork.