IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
While the rest of the world considers it a delicacy, even North America’s most ardent foodies stay away from head meat
If you stand at the top of the hill on Jamie Kennedy’s farm in Prince Edward County, you can see where the otherwise rambling vegetable garden stops and turns into a wooden pen filled with horses. Past this, a school of ducks as fluffy and white as pillows with fluorescent orange beaks the colour of Sunny Delight splash in a nearby pond. Between the ducks and horses is a barnyard kitchen with a classic pointed gambrel roof. It’s here that you’ll find servers picking up trays of canapés with efficiency before carrying each gourmet arrangement from the kitchen, through the garden and up the hill, to a pre-dinner cocktail reception where guests of Jamie Kennedy’s Summer Dinner Series are stationed outside.
“Headcheese?” A server who has just arrived up the hill asks. She holds a tray of miniature openfaced sandwiches with thick slabs of gelatinous pink meat in front of a group of diners.
“What is headcheese?” A woman demands, suspiciously eyeing the row of bite- sized pieces of millennial pink toast.
“It’s meat from the head of a pig that’s set in a savoury meat jelly,” the server patiently explains.
The woman shudders and declines the canapés before turning to her group of friends. “I can’t believe they’re serving that,” she whispers as the others nod in solidarity.
The server makes her rounds to several other groups, but the rosy hued slivers of meat jelly seem to offend more people than they please. This is surprising, as many of the guests have travelled all the way from Toronto, making the two-hour pilgrimage east to Prince Edward County for an exclusive taste of Jamie Kennedy’s critically acclaimed sustainable farmhouse cooking. They have also paid $225 per person for a set menu plus wine pairings. And yet, even among the keenest and most gastronomically inclined diners, head meat remains a hard sell.
The aversion stands in direct contrast to the rest of the world, where heads are treated as one of the most prized parts of an animal. In Japan, entire fine dining establishments are dedicated to the serving of Kabutoyaki, or seasoned fish heads that have been seared on a grill and served whole, eyeballs staring up at you from the plate. In France, langue de boeuf, or cooked cow tongue, is a delicacy. In Filipino cuisine, a dish of sizzling pork known as sisig is made from pig head meat and liver that is brightened with a splash of acid calamansi juice and hot chili peppers.
The potent, capricious smell of Russian Ukha, otherwise known as fish head soup, that my Russian babysitter used to let simmer for hours on the stove is forever burned into my memory. Fast forward 20 years, and I was shocked to find a similar scent wafting from a restaurant kitchen during a recent trip to Portugal. As it turns out, the hottest item on many Portuguese restaurant menus is not the luxurious mountains of fresh langoustines and razor clams that float in daily off the Atlantic coastline, but the limited number of merluza, or cooked hake fish heads, that are available for purchase each night.
Back home in North America, globalization and a booming food culture have helped reconstruct our previously timid palates into adventure craving entities. Today, being a foodie counts as both a fun personality trait and a source of pride. As such, it’s hardly unreasonable to spend your weekend seeking out new flavours. In some circles, lining up for hours to try a new Egyptian brunch restaurant before proudly buying $ 20 vials of smoky North African harissa paste made from maghrebi peppers and ice cream cones topped with chocolate covered crickets has become de rigueur.
At the same time, the sustainable food movement has raised awareness about how our food choices affect local economies and the environment. With a healthy seasoning of yuppie privilege, the trend has turned pricy, sustainable cuts of Ocean Wise seafood and organic beef into symbols of holistic health and political correctness. But as the palates of foodies everywhere have become more adventurous and socially conscious, head meat hasn’t broken into the mainstream. Given how flavourful and environmentally friendly the meat is, this has never made sense. The cheeks, brains and tongues of cows, fish and pigs are some of the most tender cuts of meat available, but the contradiction of sustainability alone should be enough to convince self- respecting foodies to request a fat slice of head cheese next time they are at the butcher counter.
You can’t preach about the benefits of sustainable meat while neglecting such a large and critical part of every animal. Besides the occasional trendy cut of pork cheek, head meat has a long way to go before becoming a socially acceptable ingredient. Even as the nose to tail movement has grown and advocated for the use of the whole animal, no one can seem to turn people onto the gastronomic and environmental delights of eating the head.
Unlike the cognitive dissonance provided by a faceless tuna sandwich or the sterility of a well-done steak, eating a dead head is an unnerving experience. The mere mention of the ingredient conjures up an image of glassy eyes and soggy brains, intrinsically human elements that serve as sour reminders of our complicity in the death of another living being.
Given this reality, it’s unreasonable to expect everyone who eats skirt steak to start eating the head of every cow that has generously supplied their dinner. But while feasting on head meat may seem like an unnecessarily cruel practice, the true cold-blooded act is killing an animal only to deem the most arid cuts of meat fit for human consumption. And as a bonus, headcheese tastes delicious; like velvety, spiced ham.