The grocery store down the road from me is very good about discounting soon-to-expire and other hard to sell items, and one thing they do is wrap up a bunch of meat and cheese scraps from the slicer on a meat tray, and sell it at $2.49 a pound. I usually heat a slice of meat and cheese in the oven with something else that’s cooking, and make a sandwich with it.
Anyway, there was a slice of something that looked like a cross between Spam and shaved ham (whole ham, not that wrapped in plastic stuff) and it was very fatty and fell apart when I cooked it.
It was delicious.
I know headcheese has a reputation for being “gross”, but I don’t consider an item like that any grosser than, say, sausage, which is often made out of heaven knows what.
I’m 99% certain now that headcheese was indeed what I ate.
Not something that was on my bucket list, to be sure, and not something I would seek out in the future, but it WAS good. I assume it’s usually served cold and that’s where it gets its yucky reputation?
I would not call pork jowl or guanciale “head cheese,” though. Head cheese at the very least needs to be a terrine or otherwise some sort of formed product from bits & pieces of head meat. It’s not just any head cuts. At least how I’ve always heard the term.
As the OP, I can’t definitively say if what you had was head cheese or not. It may just have been some kind of spiced, pressed ham loaf.
Yeah, sulze or souse as we call it, has a vinegar (or possibly lemon) component. It also tends to be denser and less gelatinous than headcheese. I like them both, though I don’t go out of my way to look for them. Nice on some buttered pumpernickel with a little mustard.
Think of it as an extremely coarse hotdog.
P.S. On the topic of, er, niche foods…I made tongue for the first time last night, as a pot roast. It was excellent! But I felt quite squeamish about it. Peeling off the soggy, spotted dorsum is not on my list of most enjoyable experiences. I only mention this because tongue is often a component of headcheese.
At the first deli I worked in, we just took our deli scraps and shoved them in a brown paper bag and sold them by the lb–Mystery Scraps. Most people bought it for their dogs, but you know some people bought it for themselves.
Around here, it’s a steady seller and there’s many different types. That’s what you get being near lots of Eastern Europeans. My parents are always sure to have some in the fridge. It’s okay–I’ll eat it when I’m over there, but I rarely buy it for myself. I’ve never heard of eating it warm, though. Usually on a sandwich on its own with a hearty bit of mustard.
Going back to the OP, just Google image search for “head cheese.” Can you point us to one that looks like what you had? Typically, when I’ve heard people say head cheese, gross, they are referring to the gelatinous types. (But I really can’t think of any head cheese I’ve had that wasn’t basically a jellied meat product. Some have way more of it than others, though.)
Or, option 2, next time you’re at the grocery, look at their deli section and just find what you had if you want to know for sure. I’m more inclined to guess that it wasn’t head cheese, but the description of it falling apart when cooked makes me think it may be, because if it were held together by gelatin, that would happen.
If you’re ever in Wisconsin or maybe even Chicago, ask for what they call “liver sausage”. It comes in a small ring and is approximately the equivalent of Braunschweiger, but is dull gray rather than pink-red, and has detectable chunks of nice stringy and gristly offal in it for a lovely mouthfeel. A little bit firmer than Baunschweiger, so not so easily spreadable.
